Pad Kee Mao is a
Thai noodle dish consisting of wide
rice noodles and a very, very
spicy chili sauce.
My co-workers and I shared a lunch time tradition of venturing out to the local Thai restaraunt and ordering Pad Kee Mao. In fact, accomplishing the feat of eating this extremily spicy dish in its entirety became something of a right of passage amongst our crowd.
One day, whilst at lunch at said Thai restaraunt, one of our co-workers (who had never partaked of the Pad Kee Mao, and who seemed somewhat hesitant) asked the pretty waitress for Pad Kee Mao "but with rice instead of noodles". This was to be his downfall. When the waitress brought out his dish and he began eating it, one of the other people in our party, a gentleman recently come over from England, scoffed at this person's wimpiness and said with much disdain in his thickly accented voice "How's the Pad Kee Wuss?" - and thus the concept of Pad Kee Wuss was born.
To this day this term circulates among our crowd as a euphamism for any toned-down, watered-down or otherwise altered culinary endeavor.