mothership.sg
WongNai
I am a big fan of the WongNai series of videos.
WongNai is a leading lifestyle and restaurant website in Thailand and they have won an army of fans over their quirky restaurant review videos which are absolutely hilarious.
drinksfeed.com
Their videos features these two dudes Patipran Jankaew and Junapark Gunpo playing the characters of Lamsong and Hoy Salah with absolute deadpan faces, who goes around to review restaurants with wacky antics and offbeat humour. They dress in the most deadbeat fashion and the dialogue is simply hilarious.
Says.com
Then there is this routine where Hoy Salah takes the first bite into a dish, slaps the table and goes into an ecstasy filled state, while his soul gets transported over the strains of sensuous saxophone music into a dream sequence.
In these dream sequences, Hoy Salah is often bare bodied and in a state of ecstacy and oblivion, while having food thrown at him, slathered by milk or crabs running over his body lol.
Look out for the chagrin and consternation of other unsuspecting diners who are startled by the duo’s weirdness when Hoy Salah does the table slapping scene – simply priceless.
Wongnai.com
deskgram.net
Then wait for the tall dude Lamsong to look into the camera, bring up the thumbs up signal and utter those words which trumps any erudite pronouncements the world’s best restaurant critics can offer :
“Berry Good”
The Origin
So who are these comic geniuses who have taken social media by storm, and who are waving the thai flag proudly ?
And who are the brains who brought this wacky duo into existence to become the Internet sensations they are today ?
It is none other than the youthful Athiwat Pongpanich, a content editor for Wongnai.com who scripts, shoots and edits the pair’s videos:
“One day last December,
Athiwat was scheduled to shoot a
promotional video, but the client
cancelled at the last minute.
Bored in the office, he decided to
head to the rural outskirts of
Bangkok and shoot a lighthearted
video about how to grill chicken in
the traditional Thai style – a
spiced, whole bird is placed on the
ground under an overturned
metal can, which is then heated by
burning piles of hay.
He invited Junapark and
Patipran, then working as freelance
food photographers, to tag
along. Having dark complexions
and being down-to-earth, he
thought they’d be good stand-ins
for rural folk. The personalities of
their characters were made up on
the fly during the off-the-cuff
shoot on a willing farmer’s plot of
land.
The result of the three young Thais’ afternoon in the country- side was a zany, three-minute video which introduced the dynamic duo to the world when it went viral on social media.”
Tibor Krausz
life@scmp.com
The Duo
Hoy Salah was so named because they thought Gunpo bored a resemblance to Egyptian footballer Mo Salah. If you think he does, wait till you see how he is a dead ringer for the American rapper and actor Childish Gambino.
The gangly Lamsong, who seems to be the leader of the two, speaks in a dead sombre monotone, while Hoy Salah never speaks (like mr bean). I’m just waiting for the day they allow him to speak lol.
Coconuts.co
Check this hilarious video out when the wacky duo came to Singapore recently.
Copycat advertisement
It wasn’t long before someone decided to jump on the bandwagon and produced this video to advertise their food outlet
In this video, Leng Saap singapore shoots a video of these two ladies doing a parody of the WongNai duo to publicise the food offerings of Leng Saap, particularly the pork spine soup made famous by a stall in Bangkok Rot Fai Market.
See this video of Mark Weins showcasing the Leng Saap stall at Rot Fai night market in Bangkok.
When I asked my friends if they would like to try the Leng Saap stall in Singapore at Golden Mile complex, there was a risqué comment from almost every male asking if the girls in the video came with the meal etc 🙄.
Boys will be boys .
After all the old man testosterone has died down, we managed to get a group to go down for lunch.
And we ordered these:
And how was the experience?
Well for starters, the stall decided they needed to give the full experience and blasted, and I mean blasted, ear piercing loud Thai music. We decided that we had to sit far away from the counter of the stall where the music screeched (you can see the distance from the picture of the stall I took from where we were sitting ) and even then, we had to raise our voices to make the order.
The menu was extremely limited and was no more than a dozen or so dishes, which was fine if there were a few gems.
But let me just say this – you can kind of tell how good a dish is by looking at the pics- and if you think the photographs above are somewhat photographically challenged, wait till you taste the real thing.
And how was the spine rib soup ? It was alright – but life is too short for alrights.
So no, much as I might be indulgent and even attempt to sing along to the delightful cacophony of ear drum busting Thai music if the food was good, it just wasn’t border line close.
Some of my friends will say I’m just bitter cos the two girls didn’t turn up.
To this, I respectfully retort that Bilbo has this to say to you :
THE WOLF AND BULLDOG CHRONICLES 