Who's up for a hotdog?

The third annual American Restaurant Week starts on Monday at a slew of Bangkok restaurants, and once again the cuisine ventures far from hotdogs and apple pie, encompassing all the foods that have taken root in the cosmopolitan “melting pot” that is the USA, from Italian, Chinese and Mexican to Japanese and, yes, Thai too.
The US Embassy is sponsoring the event, and it swears it’s not trying to coax Thailand into signing the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal. This is just great food – not exactly “on the house”, but with no strings attached.
American Restaurant Week is based on similar promotions that take place in cities across the US, and the idea is to celebrate the diversity of Yankee (and Rebel) cuisine. Diners will get to sample dishes specially created for the occasion and, if you say the magic words “American Restaurant Week” when ordering, you can expect discounts and possibly some freebies as well.
There’s also an “Eat, Snap, Win” contest on Instagram. You take a picture of the meal you’ve ordered at any of the participating restaurants and post it online with the hashtag “AmFoodWeek”. The post that gets the most “likes” earns an entire day of free meals.
Among the 20 restaurants involved are Bangkok Betty on Sukhumvit Soi 22, BKK Bagels in the Maneeya Building, Dean & Deluca, Black Box, La Monita at Mahatun Plaza, Osito, Bourbon Street, Burger Factory on Soi Ekkamai, Taco & Salad on Sukhumvit Soi 18 and Sunrise Taco.
Meat-lovers will be salivating at Great American Ribs on Sukhumvit Soi 36, Roadhouse BBQ on Surawong Road, New York Steakhouse at the JW Marriott Hotel on Sukhumvit Soi 2, Tony Roma’s at Terminal 21, and the US Steakhouse on Sukhumvit Soi 16.
New to the list this year is the American Bar & Grill on Sukhumvit Soi 8, which serves hearty yet affordable dishes along with great retro-rock tunes. Proprietor Tom Aikins says he felt compelled to get into the business.
“I’ve reviewed hundreds of restaurants in Bangkok for publications both back home and in Thailand and I always found that the American restaurants were too expensive or the quality wasn’t that great,” he says, “so I decided to open my own place last year – simple food from my mother’s recipes.”
Aikins has mixed in his other passion – music – at a locale with basic decor to match a small but all-inclusive menu. You can get dishes not commonly seen in the city’s American-style restaurants, such as devilled eggs, meatloaf and a Philly cheese steak sandwich. Add to these the juiciest beef burger in town and the best-tasting homemade spaghetti sauce.
“My grandparents came from Sicily, so I ate a lot of Italian food growing up,” Aikins says. “All the spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna, pizza and chicken pie to this day still remind me of home and my mother’s cooking.
“I grew up near the ocean, in Maine, so I love seafood too. You haven’t had the best seafood if you’ve never have coldwater seafood from the US. To me, it’s the best in the world.”
What makes American food interesting is the way it’s adapted traditions from Europe and elsewhere using available ingredients. Visitors from “the old country” find the tastes very familiar, but there’s always something uniquely New World about the food.
Of course the United States’ sprawling size also accounts for significant regional variations, all influenced by the local settlers’ ethnicity, from Latino and German to Scandinavian and everything in between. British cuisine, such as it is, has never been evident in American kitchens – the two countries did fight a couple of wars, after all – and yet it did have an influence. The early British colonists in New England imported one-pot cookery, which resulted in such all-American dishes as succotash, chowder and baked beans.
Meanwhile in the Southwest and Southern California, Mexican food migrated across the border and transformed into wholly new variants, including Tex-Mex cuisine.
“Take spaghetti and meatballs, for example,” says Aikins.”It’s loosely based on Italian cuisine, but you won’t find it in Italy. Germans brought sausages and they evolved into the hotdog, which is unique to America. New York cheesecake, I believe, was adapted from a Jewish dessert and it’s now one of the city’s signature dishes.
“If you ask me what represents American food best, I’d say go for barbecued ribs and steaks. Nobody eats as much steak as Americans do, and no one cooks meat on a grill like we do!”

This food is your food

American Restaurant Week runs Monday through November 2.
For more information and a list of the participating restaurants, go to http://Bangkok.USEmbassy.gov/arw2015.html.