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Anthony Rosenfeld was burned out from a high-pressure job. He quit and started on a new path. Now, he and his wife, Peace, who is from Thailand, have opened a food cart serving the dishes they eat at home.
After grueling 90-hour work weeks doing project management on the redevelopment of Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena, Anthony Rosenfeld decided he needed a change, physically and mentally.
A diabetes diagnosis and job stress were getting to him. Still, he felt like he had to see the work on the arena to its completion.
“I knew something was wrong, but I waited until the job was done, and then my doctor yelled and screamed at me,” he said. “I was pretty sick.”
Rosenfeld overhauled his lifestyle. Part of that meant starting his own audio-video business, so he had a little more control over his work life. The other part was opening a food cart with his wife, Pitchayaporn Sarasmut, something they had always wanted to do.
“You’ve got to do what you want to do at some point in your life,” Rosenfeld said. “And if you don’t at least try it, then when you die and you’re lying there, you know, you’re like ‘Well, I didn’t even try it.’ So I quit the job.”
From dream to reality
With partners, he started Suriyothai Kitchen, a food cart at 24th Avenue and Hilyard Street in Eugene. After a couple of years, that project was no longer working and permanently closed. In February, he and Sarasmut, who goes by Peace, started SOI 44 at the food cart pod behind the Monkey’s Paw tiki bar in Springfield.
The name and the logo for SOI 44 has meanings on several levels. Rosenfeld explains that in the context of numerology, 44 is a symbol for balance. He drew the “S” in the logo to resemble a snake, which is an ancient symbol for healing — the caduceus symbol of two snakes winding around a winged staff representing the medical profession is a modern use. The lotus flower in the logo is a symbol of rebirth. Combining the 44 creates an 8, which is a lucky symbol and the symbol of infinity. In Thai, a “soi” is a narrow street or alley, and Eugene is on the 44th parallel.
“When you look at [the logo] it’s supposed to be a positive, uplifting feeling,” Rosenfeld said. “We have a lot of people who walk up and go, ‘What does it mean?’ and then a lot of people can see the significance.”
Rosenfeld’s tattoos and jewelry also hold significance. He wears a ring made out of a fork, representing his love for food.
“I’m interested in cooking and traveling, so I travel and eat everywhere I go,” he said.
He has tattoos in Sanskrit representing luck, the dates when he and Peace met and his daughter Molly’s birthday, and a tattoo representing his guardian angel.
The Thailand connection
In November 2007, Rosenfeld was working for ESPN and had a dream about going to Thailand.
“I’d never been, never researched it,” he said. “But I was almost done with a project so I bought a ticket.”
Within the first two days he met Peace, and they spent about a year in Thailand together.
Sarasmut, who grew up in Chonburi, a province near Bangkok, brings her family recipes to the cart. She was raised by two mothers – one who made a living making flat noodles, and another, a teacher, who adopted her. Her hometown, a small coastal community known for seafood, influenced her cooking.
At the cart, they serve the food they eat at home.
“My wife’s family cooks really well,” Rosenfeld said. “We go over the dishes and come up with our recipes, and we work on it until we love it. And we try it out on all sorts of different people,” before it gets added to the menu.
Rosenfeld loves the pad ka pow, a fried rice dish which can be made with smoked pork belly, scallop, or shrimp (in Thai cuisine, “pad” means to stir fry). Sarasmut calls pad ka pow “probably the most popular dish in Thailand.”
Sarasmut’s favorite dishes on the menu are the pad ka pow and the guay tiew nam, a pork-based noodle soup with wontons, a soft-boiled egg, and a broth layered with flavor from garlic, chili, vinegar, sugar, and fish sauce.
When someone visits the cart for the first time and doesn’t know what to order, she recommends the smoked pork belly. Thai popcorn, or moo krob tod, is a favorite that Rosenfeld says is a popular snack in Thailand (“krob” means crispy or crunchy). That dish is marinated fried pork belly served with jim jaew, a popular tamarind-based dipping sauce.
“The sauce is served with everything in Thailand,” Rosenfeld said, but is rarely found in American Thai restaurants.
Another nontypical dish is bamee hang — a salty, sweet, and garlicky dish made with egg noodles, pork, fried pork skins, bean sprouts, and house-made sauce. In Thailand it’s called dry egg noodles, which means there’s no broth.
“It’s not a dish you find here,” Rosenfeld said.
Diners can also get Thai iced tea as well as housemade rambutan or lychee lemonade. For dessert, the cart offers sweet roti, an interesting sweetened egg dish that has a long history of being introduced to Thailand by Indian traders.
Pad Thai, a popular dish in America, is not on the menu. Rosenfeld said pad Thai is not popular in Thailand, “not a normal thing that people eat.”
American Thai restaurants, he said, typically have similar menus that are designed to appeal to Americans. He sometimes gets asked why they chose the menu they did, and it boils down to wanting to bring authentic flavors from Thailand to Eugene, where people might not be exposed to what Thai flavors really are.
“When I talk to Thai restaurant owners here, they often say, ‘Americans won’t eat the more authentic dishes. They only want pad Thai and the basics.’ But that’s not true anymore,” Rosenfeld said.
The couple sources authentic ingredients directly from Thailand, which Rosenfeld said gives their dishes an authenticity and flavor that is akin to using house-made aioli instead of basic mayonnaise from a jar on a sandwich.
“We have the exact sauces that are used in Thailand, and they’re the Thai brands,” Rosenfeld said. “The taste is different.”
The couple keep their prices reasonable, because, he said, being able to afford to go out to eat is getting harder to do. Currently, appetizers range from $6 for fried wonton chips to $12 for chicken satay, and entrees are between $12 and $18; the highest priced item is a marinated ribeye steak from Springfield’s Bright Oaks Meat, served on weekends only. The cart also offers smoked tofu in place of the pork belly in pad ka pow, pad se ew, Thai fried rice, and yellow curry.
“The goal is to give people good food at a good price that people can enjoy,” he said.
Sarasmut enjoys the customer interactions, especially when diners ask her to choose their meal. “A lot of customers ask me, ‘Hey, pick for me first,’ and then they come back and have me make that for them again,” she said. “It makes me feel good, like, oh, you trust me.”
It’s a feel-good venture overall.
“I know we won’t get rich from a food cart,” Rosenfeld said. “It’s a labor of love.”
Want to go?
SOI 44
- Where: In the Monkey’s Paw food cart pod, 426 Main St., Springfield
- Hours: 4 to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday; 4 to 11:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday
- More: https://soi44.com
