You just put in any dish and it gives you a rating, out of 100, as to how authentic the dish is. Tested by The New York Times’ Thomas Fuller, it gave the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand’s green curry a rating of 78 out of 100. Anything under 80 is a fail, providing definitive proof that foreign journalists are incapable of understanding Thai-style democracy—oops, sorry—cooking.
BK’s secret operatives have already been able to secure blueprints to the machine and turn it into an iOS8 app. Here are the few dishes we’ve tested so far, and how they scored:
- 23/100. The kanom jeen noodles at Bo.lan. We were shocked by the lack of MSG in the nam yaa. Also, the noodles didn’t have that plaster-y taste that we associate with genuine gypsum-slash-noodle factories. Completely inauthentic, as our rating indicates.
- 12/100. The blue swimmer crab wrapped in egg-net at Paste. We associate crab with a strong taste of ammonia, from the decomposing flesh, and formaldehyde, added to slow down said decomposition. The dish we had at Paste, disappointingly, tasted of neither. A complete fail.
- 45/100. The jackfruit in coconut milk at Nahm. A distinct lack of flour in the coconut milk makes us suspect it has not been tampered with and may actually be from fresh coconuts instead of a trusty Tetrapak. The result is just weird and not at all how the lady down our soi makes it.
- 98/100. The cheese sausage roll crust from Pizza Company. Now here’s a dish that encapsulates the essence of modern Thai cuisine. It’s playful, it’s bursting with Akinomoto-levels of umami goodness, it balances the four tastes—oily, ketchupy, syrupy, processed-cheesy—perfectly. It just feels right, as our app confirmed.
Apart from weeding out inauthentic Thai recipes, the side benefit of this new BK app is that we can finally stop obsessing over what food tastes like and focus on what really matters—what it looks like on Instagram. A good day for Thai food, indeed.
Page 3 is satire, not news. More Page 3.
