Thai Cooking: From the Siam Cuisine Restaurant (Paperback)

by Kwanruan Aksomboon (Author), Diana Hiranaga (Author), Somchai Aksomboon (Author) "Fried Tofu tastes best piping hot..." (more)
Key Phrases: spicy chili oil, fine julienne pieces, teaspoon sweet soy sauce, Golden Mountain, Siam Cuisine, Green Chili Sauce (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
Siam Cuisine is a little oasis of taste delights...more than sixty items of good, honest Thai cooking...the best place for squid dishes on this side of the Bay.
-Les Bank, East Bay Express

Product Description
Siam Cuisine is a unique restaurant in Berkeley, California, which has been acclaimed since the early eighties for serving authentic Thai food rivaling that in Bangkok restaurants. Gathered here are more than 100 recipes for their superbly cooked dishes—chicken simmered in red curry with coconut and bamboo shoots...prawns and calamari with sweet basil and chilies...coconut soup with pickled garlic and red preserved bean curd.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: North Atlantic Books (January 7, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556430744
• ISBN-13: 978-1556430749
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #655,765 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Thai cookbook, authentic., August 27, 1998

By A Customer

This is a great Thai cookbook. Simple to understand, a variety of dishes so the non-beginner won't get bored, and things uniformly taste wonderful. Apparently the authors run a great Thai restaurant in the East Bay area of San Francisco, California. It's the Thai cookbook I refer to the most of the several I own; and apparently the authors have produced a Thai cooking video as well, which it doesn't look like Amazon.com carries as yet. You can find the Siam Cuisine website, though, for further info, I suppose.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Thai cookbook ever, one of my favorites, June 30, 2002

By	Jeffrey T Barker (Savannah, GA United States) - See all my reviews

I bought this book when I was 18 and working my way through college as a cook. I loved Asian food, but did't have much experience cooking Thai food. The fact that this cookbook makes you (lets you) make all the curries from scratch is wonderful. It took some searching to get all the ingredients exactly right, but the first few meals I made with this book were just amazing. I continued to cook, and became a professional chef with a giant bookshelf full of cookbooks, well over 200. Now, 14 years later, I rarely use cookbooks, but whenever I do, or if a friend wants to borrow a book for something new, this is the one I give them. I love all of the Charlie Trotter books for the pics and ideas, but this book is the best for recipes. (I know I'm crossing cultural barriers, but I hope you get the point.) After I made my first meal from this book, for a girlfriend, I vowed that I'd go to this restaurant if I ever "made it to San Francisco." Well, now every time I'm there, I make sure I hit Berkeley to go there. The restaurant lives up to all of the recipes, and, this might surprise some, the dishes in the restaurant taste JUST LIKE the ones made from the book. It's one of my favorite restaurants, definitely the best Thai restaurant I've ever been to, and without a doubt, if we're judging cookbooks by the number of times they've been opened, this is the best among my collection. If you're in a smaller city, you might have some trouble getting some ingredients, but if you can't improvise you can always get something from the net. Even if you DO have do substitute some ingredients, I would recommend this cookbook above any other Thai cookbook I've seen, and above any other Asian cookbook as well.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Fine if you go all out, January 23, 2005

By	D. Downie (Brisbane, Qld Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was disappointed with this book because too many of the recipes are not self contained, but rather require you use "Special Sauce #1" or "Special Sauce #2". What if I don't want to make a big batch of your special sauce (that intentionally creates more than for just one recipe). I want to be able to see a recipe and follow it to produce a dish for that night. I own a lot of thai cookbooks. This one does not see the light of day.