Reader does secret Thai menus

There used to be a rather mercurial fellow posting in our community who had it as one of his missions to raise the level of food journalism in Chicago and beyond that the image of food in this city-- expressing considerable pleasure or displeasure when we posted something which either aided or halted Chicago's upward progress toward being recognized as the great food city it is, alongside more successfully self-promoting spots like NY and SF.

Frankly I thought he overstated the degree to which anything we said had any impact beyond our own board. But now I wonder if he wasn't more right than I thought-- and we haven't, indeed, begun to change how people think about food in the city of deep dish and Italian beef.

Exhibit A: an article in this week's Reader covering interesting Thai food at three spots: Silver Spoon, Elephant Thai and TAC Quick.

It's not just that all three are places that have been talked about here-- though, indeed, I have been present at some of the meals which the writer, Mike Sula, talks about. But everybody contributes places to the conversation, we find out about places at least as much from the media as the media finds out about them from us. That's not such a big deal, just finding a name of a new restaurant.

What's so striking is that all three places are talked about in reference not only to the standard menu but to off-menu or secret menu dishes. This seems to me an extraordinary thing, the mainstreaming of the idea that gringo Reader readers would be able to walk in and chat up the proprietors to get "secret" dishes that they wouldn't have even known existed a while back. The article takes it for granted that everyone is capable of, and encouraged to, pierce the usual ethnic restaurateur-gringo customer barrier and get the good, more exotic stuff.

How many people actually will? Maybe not many. But the point is that our behavior, so deviant just a year or two ago (ask them what they're having for lunch and ask if you can have some too? What if it has totally gross stuff in it?) is becoming normal. There's absolutely nothing of the "well, here's an amusing angle-- some food nuts actually talk to the staff and ask for unusual dishes" novelty tone to the way the article describes how the food was uncovered.

So check the article out, then check the food it talks about out, and help lift Chicago ever higher to where it ought to be in the food pantheon. He's counting on you.

I often stop for takeout from TAC on the way home from work. Often, as I peruse the dining room while waiting on my order, I think, "The people dining here probably think that this is the greatest Thai place they have ever eaten. Yet few of them seem to be ordering from the "paper" menu. It's a real shame that they're having the best Thai-American in town and don't even know that the place that serves the second best Thai-American also serves the best Thai."

I lost track of who was what in your last sentence there. Could you annotate?