ร้านกะเพราคุณพ่อ

There're plenty of eateries offering good krapow at super reasonable prices. A plain phad krapow chicken (ผัดกระเพราไก่) at a street stall priced at ฿150 for a small portion, is meant for Chinese tourists and such. A fancy restaurant would charge as much, but chances are they tend to serve it to you with an additional small bowl of melon soup.

This is comfort food. Each home and eatery will do a different version of phad krapow with some sort of meat. You gotta see which kinds you like. Somehow, phad krapow seems to taste best when the meat used is pork. Well, I'm not enthusiastic about chicken anything. I suppose fish and shrimps are good too, but not as satisfying as a 'cheap' plate. I'm not big on pork, so I tend to take only two pieces or two spoonfuls, and share the meat with the table. It's that beautiful combination of fish sauce, chillies and crisp holy basil leaves that I love.

Eateries in Singapore don't usually do the extra step of separately air-frying/deep-frying the holy basil leaves. What a pity. That really takes phad krapow up another level. The sodden ones are just a little sad. Otherwise, the eateries get lazy and use a different type of basil, which is wrong, making the dish taste weird. I have two restaurants in Singapore that do this dish pretty all right, by my standards. Mostly, we always end up stir-frying this dish at home because we can then cook it to our preferences. The larder is stocked with all necessary Thai spices, and holy basil leaves. While I don't own an air-fryer, the holy basil leaves can be easily done in the oven.

Since S and N love phad krapow too, we had to take them to our favorite Kaprow Khun Phor (ร้านกะเพราคุณพ่อ) for lunch. It's not far, just at Silom Soi 20, so we always make time for a meal there as long as the standards are kept. We had some strange pork soup that didn't turn out too bad, and the slices of pork liver came perfectly done medium tender. Glad that S and N loved it too! This is comfort food at its best lah. For now, we're happy satisfying phad krapow cravings here. Phad krapow every day? OH YES PLEASE.