I Shouldn't Be Writing About This But I Can't Help It... Gyros!
I realize that I should be blogging about life here in Bangkok. With only three weeks to go here, I'm becoming sentimental about living here, and I'm starting to become nostalgic about it even though I'm still here. It's like I know what I'm about to lose, so I'm savoring every moment as best I can. (This sentimentality seems to be a common theme in my life; it happened at the end of high school, the end of college, the end of my life as a free/real/non-med-school-slave person. Even the end of Dawson's Creek or Felicity or Sex and the City- yikes revealed my guilty pleasures there.)
But as I was about to blog about life here and my travels with Lawrence during our stint here, I was concurrently reading nytimes.com and stumbled upon an article by David Segal about the history of one of my favorite foods/mystery meats, gyros! (And I pronounce it GI-ros (sorry for the terrible phoentic spelling of my pronunciation), as we do in NYC, not YEE-ros, as the rest of world does). And since I haven't had a gyro in so long (since visiting Greek Lady at Penn in Philly last April- so long ago!) and started to salivate as I read the article, I figured I'd pay it a bit of attention here.
The gyro meat cones, it turns out, used to be handmade from left over beef and lamb trimmings by the individual Greek restaurants that served them. They only started to be mass produced Henry-Ford-style in the 1970s, and the idea was birthed by a Mr. Garlic, a brilliant Jewish man whom I would have liked to personally thank for his gyro genius had he still been alive today. (He died in the 1990s.) Unfortunately, neither he nor his family really got to harvest the fruits of his labor and genius; he and his business partner had a falling out, leaving the Garlics out of the mass production of gyro cone meat. His widow's heart still breaks every time she sees a cone of meat in a restaurant. (To draw an analogy to a recent tennis world event, she must feel like Andy Roddick every time he sees Roger Federer across the net, especially after this last, grueling, heartbreaking Wimbledon final loss a couple of weeks ago. Poor Andy = Poor Mrs. Garlic)
Mmm... gyros. I better go eat some street pad thai to take my mind off my favorite mystery meat.
But as I was about to blog about life here and my travels with Lawrence during our stint here, I was concurrently reading nytimes.com and stumbled upon an article by David Segal about the history of one of my favorite foods/mystery meats, gyros! (And I pronounce it GI-ros (sorry for the terrible phoentic spelling of my pronunciation), as we do in NYC, not YEE-ros, as the rest of world does). And since I haven't had a gyro in so long (since visiting Greek Lady at Penn in Philly last April- so long ago!) and started to salivate as I read the article, I figured I'd pay it a bit of attention here.
The gyro meat cones, it turns out, used to be handmade from left over beef and lamb trimmings by the individual Greek restaurants that served them. They only started to be mass produced Henry-Ford-style in the 1970s, and the idea was birthed by a Mr. Garlic, a brilliant Jewish man whom I would have liked to personally thank for his gyro genius had he still been alive today. (He died in the 1990s.) Unfortunately, neither he nor his family really got to harvest the fruits of his labor and genius; he and his business partner had a falling out, leaving the Garlics out of the mass production of gyro cone meat. His widow's heart still breaks every time she sees a cone of meat in a restaurant. (To draw an analogy to a recent tennis world event, she must feel like Andy Roddick every time he sees Roger Federer across the net, especially after this last, grueling, heartbreaking Wimbledon final loss a couple of weeks ago. Poor Andy = Poor Mrs. Garlic)
Mmm... gyros. I better go eat some street pad thai to take my mind off my favorite mystery meat.
posted by Christina at 4:26 AM
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