Bangkok Street Food

Outside a 7-11 store in downtown Bangkok a family runs a pavement restaurant in sweltering heat. Great-Gran

Bangkok Street Chefs

and Gran in the kitchen, Mum greeting new customers and taking payment, little 9 year old bringing cutlery, washing up and generally providing cuteness. There is a lot of communication. Approaching farangs much discussed even before we present ourselves. Thai grins in quad.

Table for 2? Big sparkling Thai Grin. Anywhere.

We alight on seats like upturned buckets at a table that looks like it was recovered from a rubbish dump. It is scrubbed clean

Feeding the city… 4th. generation

though.

Menu for you! Kap kun, krap…

A huge list of items in Thai script dreadfully translated into English.

Phad Thai, rice and chicken, 2 beers? So sorry no beers. You buy here..

The pointing finger indicates the 7-11. Of course, no refrigeration, no electricity, no licence, no drinks. In the shop I buy a beer and an iced tea for 60baht.

Returning to the table, lunch is already served. Steaming hot straight from the wok, these dishes are spicy, citrusy, salty and with a hint of sweet. The phad thai is sprinkled with crushed peanut and coriander. You wouldn’t get a better lunch in any London restaurant.

The bill for food comes to 100baht for the 2 meals. So including drinks that is GBP 3.20 or GBP 1.60 per head. Could one produce such a meal at home for the same outlay, including the stove gas?

Fascinated, I begin to take photos and ask questions.

What is this here? And what is that? Can I watch? OK to take photo?

Gran is making the sauces, Great-Gran does the rice and noodles.

Gran has the kind of array of herbs, spices, syrups, pastes, sauces, sugars, chopped roots, nuts, vegetables and pickles that only tropical diversity can provide. All this arranged in old margarine tubs on the half meter square top of her steel trolley. She has a metal spatula, and a wok above a gas flame. Battered straw hat (1); toothy-peg grin (1), happy attitude that exceeds the mass of the visible universe (1). She is immensely pleased by my interest, although linguistic communication is nil.

On her daughter’s signal she cooks, loading up her metal spatula from the array of tupperware pots in front of her, each with its own spoon. In less than a second a primed wok is full of sizzling ingredients.
The four larger pots immediately in front of her are clearly significant. Snail’s pace communication reveals that these are the 4 signature Thai flavours: Tamarind (sour), soy sauce (salty), palm sugar syrup (sweet) and red chilli (hot). She can call on each of these with the flick of a spoon. If cookery were orchestral it might look like her trolley: bass, tenor, alto and soprano choir immediately in front, then at the flick of a baton holy basil, coriander, mushrooms, chopped shallots, chopped peanuts, galangal, chopped lemon grass, kafir lime leaves, limes and the rest of the orchestra arranged around.
Bangkok’s Karajan cooks and grins a gappy grin.

Bangkok

Aperitif, Nr Thewet Pier

Friday 24 Jan.

English winter blues and maladies melt in honey tropical sun. Cold beers and thai snacks. It’s 29oC and the scent of the river mixes with fragrant mesquite street grills, fried shallots and chilli. In this “quiet” part of town, individual tuk-tuks are audible – there being little background din. Jetlag, beer, weird birdsong, unknown plants.

We snack on prawns deep-fried in pastry and a mix of toasted cashews with chopped spring onions and chillis.

Steve’s, Thewet Pier, Bangkok

Friday 24 Jan.

Across a footbridge and along a very narrow canalside footpath the way leads through some folks’ back gardens. White skin, weird blue eyes, bizarre mousy hair, “You MUST be lost; where you go”. “Steve’s”, “Aha  yes – aroy aroy”, big buddhist smiles. It seems the locals approve of this restaurant and indeed of any seekers after its pleasures; they point the way ahead. There is no disappointment. Tom kha gai, massaman curry, prawns in

Steve’s: Dinner is served…

tamarind and a veg dish translated as “morning glory”. There is a chance the kitchen Gods and Goddesses who prepared the food may not be linguists. There is no need for someone who cooks the way they do to be good at anything else at all.

Anyone who has been to  Bangkok and didn’t like town, please go to Steve’s riverside restaurant next visit and then write a full and complete apology to the city on tripadvisor afterwards. You will feel the need to. It’s not just the food, or the blissful sight of sundown across the river from the terrace or the delightful service. It’s the approach to the place past kids playing street football, grandma watching tv with window open, someone rounding up chickens, stepping over stoned looking dogs in pink tea-shirts as you go. Real Thai folk live round here…

The massaman curry (chicken) contained one single whole piece of chicken. The dish was served about room temp. The meat came off the bone so easily (no knives were provided) I deduced it had been slow-cooked in the curry sauce. It was outstanding. Are all the recipes wrong?

Tom Kha Gai. Not as creamy as mine. Plenty of stock, and very citrusy without being sour. Lemon grass?

The food came to 650bh.

Preparations…

We plan a trip East in search of warmth, ambrosial food and tropical gardens and fauna.

Itinerary:

Bangkok, Penang, Melucca, Singapore, Ha Noi, Da Nang, Saigon, Hua Hin, Chiang Mai

On the wishlist: food, cookery lessons, fishing trips and the tropical gardens of the former Malay Straights Botanic Gardens and Forestry department.

Faunawise, we understand the Penang gardens are run by a troop of long-tailed macaques, for example. We have a visit to an elephant rescue centre slated for our Chiang-Mai stage. Tigers, Leopards, Crocodiles… in the mega diverse zone we are visiting, indigenous animals recall childhood visits to zoos; exotic, dangerous and beautiful animals will be around us somewhere, but in their own space.

Waiting at Calcott bus station with England’s damp January winds whistling around the sarong and tugging at the chinstrap of the pith helmet will be chilly, but half a day later sultry conditions will prevail and we will be glad of our light packing.

As our 6-week Grand Tour ticks past, the Earth will tilt, and we hope for friendlier days when we return.

At 54 excitement can be a rare sentiment, but I am enjoying a frisson of anticipation as like many of our ancestors, we voyage East in search of spice…