Doggy Bag: Sharing the Burn

Lao chow: At Bay Area Bites, Andrew Simmons stretches out for a trek through some of East Oakland's Lao restaurants. The sunny San Antonio neighborhood at the edge of Fruitvale should be listed as a Bay Area culinary heritage site if such a designation existed. It's a place where restaurants are only a step or two away from the home kitchens they grew from, catering to a mostly micro clientele who know the food so intimately, they won't put up with diluting it for the sake of expediency. We love Simmons bro-dacious attempts at eating Green Papaya Salad's namesake dish, packed with multiple chiles, prepared by Lily Senephansiri:

The first time I visited, I ate the salad with seven chiles and gently steamed at my corner table. The second time I came through, I tried it with twelve and felt, as I desperately seized fistfuls of heat-dampening sticky rice, as if my chest might explode if I dared to down another slippery forkful. According to Lily's nephew Ken, the restaurant's waiter, his aunt will add up to twenty for the most masochistic (and showy) of chile-fiends. Of course, he had to immediately assure me that I, being white and American, could always expect to receive considerably fewer chiles than I'd request. He meant that kindly, I think, but I did feel a twinge of disappointment. I had been proud to hang, at least for half a plate, with twelve, but my "twelve," as it turned out, was actually more like "six," my "seven" just a few. Ken showed me a massive bag of the mean-looking chiles, and I felt better. They were gnarled blue spikes, each only a third the size of my pinkie--sort of like wicked appendages to a knight's armor.