Street Smarts in Bangkok

SURROUNDED by groups of civil servants greedily slurping bowls of soup at Chote Chitr, a tiny, family-run restaurant in the older part of Bangkok, our table soon overflows like a Thai Thanksgiving. The yam makhua, a salad of grilled long eggplants topped with tiny dried shrimps, combines the tang of fresh shallots with expert charring. Prepared by the hand of a skilled griller, the vegetables retain a smoky crunch on the outside, but a first bite pierces the crackling char and reveals a juicy eggplant so sweet it resembles a ripe peach, full of lime juice and fish sauce that has soaked into the flesh.

Next comes Chote Chitr’s gaeng som, a soup flavored with tamarind and palm sugar, packed with chunks of coarsely chopped cauliflower and large, meaty shrimp, their fat melting into the hot broth. Native to southern Thailand, where cooks use the abundant local seafood, gaeng som has a dense mouth feel, because the chef has added finely ground fish flesh into the stock, thickening it like roux.
Chote Chitr, which has been around some 90 years, prides itself on cooking recipes developed by ancient Thai royal courts, and its wall menu lists hundreds of dishes. These often rely on traditional ingredients tough to find today, and Chote Chitr’s cooks say little about how they uncover them. Dodging longtime customers and a small dog in the tiny dining room — just five simple rectangular tables packed together and open to the street — the chef brings out a plate of mee krob, crunchy stir-fried vermicelli flavored with a caramelized sauce of palm sugar, ginger, lemongrass and som saa. A fragrant, tart variety of orange now almost extinct in Bangkok, the som saa balances the sticky sweetness in the dish, which in the hands of a lesser chef can taste like strands of rock candy.
A decade ago, when I first moved to Bangkok, a friend who had emigrated there long before me let me in on a secret: the best food in Thailand is served by street vendors and at basic mom-and-pop restaurants. To prove his point, he dragged me to Chote Chitr, tucked into a side alley and decorated with nothing but a wall calendar. I saw no foreigners, and we pored through a menu all in Thai. We sampled the specialties, and I was quickly convinced, eating the same dishes then that I would enjoy 10 years later, and dozens of times in between.

That Chote Chitr would prove a culinary revelation shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise: small places often prove to be the best eating spots in many cities. But for historical reasons Bangkok may boast the finest street food on earth. The city has long attracted migrants from across Asia, so its street cuisine, both at vendor carts and in tiny restaurants, blends many styles of cooking. Even a simple snack like murtabak mixes Malaysian-style roti pancake with curry fillings that betray Indian and Burmese spices.
THAI habits also lend themselves to street meals. Since Thais normally eat many small meals rather than three squares and traditionally prefer to meet outside the house, street food suits them. Many Thai dishes can be cooked relatively quickly, and Thais are fastidious about cleanliness, important to customers worried about eating alongside a road.
But every trip to Thailand prompts me to wonder: can Bangkok remain the world leader in its simple culinary prowess? In an era of the globalization of street food, when the Internet now allows food lovers to share tips, will Bangkok’s street food lose its edge?
After culling through Thai food Web sites, I often arrive in Bangkok carrying a list of street dishes I must try — unripe mangoes dipped in sweet chili sauce, charcoal-grilled fish sausages, tacolike shells filled with shredded coconut. Every time I mention my list, real Thai gourmets tell me noodles, the ultimate quick snack, should be the real test of any street stall.
“Noodles are one of the great Thai secular religions,” wrote the longtime Thailand food critic Ung-aang Talay, adding that Thais think nothing of plodding across Bangkok to sample a new dish. Nearly every street in Bangkok has a vendor selling thin, slightly sweet egg noodles; wide, chewy rice noodles; pad Thai topped in gooey omelets. Even, occasionally, the northern Thailand noodle specialty known as khao soi. As the Thailand food blogger Austin Bush has suggested on his knowledgeable khao soi reflects the many foreign influences on Thailand cuisine. Khao soi blends egg noodles with a mild, Indian-style broth and toppings of crispy noodles, shallots and pickled cabbage, a Burmese touch that adds an acidic flavor cutting the rich, oily curry.
Like rock bands, the best noodle slingers attract groupies. Normally, a plate of noodles costs the equivalent of less than a dollar, but at Raan Jay Fai, a simple open-air restaurant in old Bangkok, noodles run four times as much. Outside Raan Jay Fai, lines of cars, tuk-tuks and motorcycles crawl through the hot air, belching exhaust toward Jay Fai’s al fresco seating. Still, at Jay Fai’s opening time of around 4 in the afternoon, a line waits to be served, and the cook throws handfuls of chicken chunks and noodles into a pan as if she were a metronome on double time.

I tried Jay Fai noodles stir-fried with spicy Thai basil, a dish also called drunken noodles. Some Thais believe the dish got its name because street cooks serve it into the wee hours, when their clientele is the drunkest. The broad rice noodles come out of the pan thin and chewy, as if they could tear easily. Yet they never turn tough, and the chef has thrown in large bits of sweet Thai basil, the edges seared with a slight soy aftertaste.

Raan Jay Fai opened far from central Bangkok, near the older part of town, which contains a large percentage of vendors who have stuck to traditional recipes. Not far away, in the heart of Little India, a solitary man stands over a giant wok crackling with oil, focused on his task. All around him, shoppers lugging bags of saris, incense and Bollywood videos squeeze past one another on the sidewalk, spilling into the street and sometimes knocking a passerby to the ground.

For less than the equivalent of 50 cents the man hands out bags of pakoras and crisp vegetarian samosas. As you bite into a samosa, the triangular pastry yields an almost liquid mix of potatoes and spices, like a Shanghai-style dumpling filled with soup. This being Thailand, it also packs a punch, with far more ground chilies inside than in the samosas you would encounter in a New York Indian restaurant.
Though Thailand easily absorbs cuisines like Indian, Malay or Cambodian, one influence dominates. Thais of Chinese heritage run many Bangkok industries, and at night they gather to talk shop at the city’s basic Chinese-Thai restaurants, many of which serve fresh ingredients cooked simply and quickly. Some, like the famous Somboon Seafood, have been around so long they’ve become Bangkok institutions. At Nguan Lee, a typical Chinese-Thai joint, waitresses bring out fresh local sea bass, plucked from tanks outside and steamed with chilies, chopped raw garlic and a broth of lime juice and rinds of kaffir lime. Not just sprinkled on top, the chilies have been embedded into the fish meat, so they pop out of the soft flesh onto the tongue.
Still, Nguan Lee, becoming popular with visitors, seems to have watered down the garlic in this dish. A friend recommends a more full-on garlic experience, plaa tod kratiem phrik Thai, fish coated in garlic and thin chilies and then deep-fried. This satisfies the garlic craving. The fish skin crunches like cornflakes, and squirts hot, oily garlic into my mouth, like garlic’s purest essence. Inside the crunchy crust, the sea bass remains tender.

One step down from a real sit-down restaurant like Nguan Lee are the kap gaeng (with rice) joints, collections of street stalls serving various curries over rice. Kap gaeng outlets reveal the diversity of Thai regional cooking, often lost at restaurants in America, which tend to focus on the better-known dishes of central and northeastern Thailand. At Talad Loong Perm, a collection of stalls near Thai Airways’ main office in Bangkok, a market that made Food & Wine’s 2007 “Go List,” vendors stir crimson, orange and yellow curries floating with wisps of coconut milk. One chef ladles out gaeng leung, a southern curry flavored with chunky squash and turmeric.
I timidly taste a spoonful of gaeng pa, or jungle curry, maybe the hottest dish in Thailand the intense chilies and bamboo shoots traditionally used to cover the flavor of wild game or nearly spoiled meat. Jungle curry may have served a purpose in rural areas, but it is made these days with tender chicken, and the fire overwhelms any flavor of the bird, leaving the lips scalded and unable to taste.
Knowing I love trying many dishes at the same meal, on one trip to Bangkok my friend Noy takes me around to Bangkok’s modern indoor food courts, upscale versions of kap gaeng. Food Loft, which sits atop the upscale Central department store, has become the hottest version several levels of comfortable booths packed with beautiful people wearing wrap-around shades. Food Loft’s gaeng som packs the proper mix of tart and sweet, but it tastes thin, and seems to have none of the hearty ground-up fish. It gets worse: the fresh spring rolls, veggies and shrimp wrapped in a soft wonton skin, come served with a gluey sauce that tastes too much of corn starch.
Disappointment never lasts long on the streets of Bangkok, though. Back at Chote Chitr, the chef welcomes a friend and me by name. After greedily slurping down gaeng som and a salad made from banana flowers, we consider stepping outside for dessert, since a shop nearby sells glutinous rice cooked in coconut cream.
But we don’t want to leave, and settle on one of Chote Chitr’s specials, a reimagining of the classic traditional Thai papaya salad, som tam. Instead of making som tam with unripe papaya, Chote Chitr uses pineapple and mango, with salty fish sauce drawing out the natural sugar of the so-ripe-they’re-ready-to-turn fruits. I vacuum them down, waddle into a cab, and fall asleep on the ride home, thinking about my next meal.

POINT AND ORDER
GETTING THERE
Thai Airways flies nonstop between Kennedy Airport and Bangkok. Flights in early February start at $1,015. Other airlines (United, Continental, American, Northwest, Japan Airlines and All Nippon, among others) change planes and sometimes carriers en route, often in Tokyo.

WHERE TO EAT
Many simple Bangkok restaurants have no working phone (and few employees who speak English), so it may take some time to find them. You might also have to resort to the timeless point-at-what-looks-tasty method of ordering. Have your hotel write down the name and address in Thai, and embark upon your street food hunt with considerable patience. Dinner for two at most of these restaurants will cost less than 500 baht, about $16 at 31 baht to the U.S. dollar.

Raan Jay Fai
327 Mahachai Road, (66-2) 223-9384, is near Wat Saket in the older part of Bangkok

Nguan Lee
corner of Soi Lang Suan and Soi Sarasin, is in the central business district; (66-2) 250-0936.

Chote Chitr
Prang Pu Thorn alley, off Tanao Road, is in the old part of Bangkok.

Samosa seller
near the corner of Phahurat and Chakraphet Roads in Little India. Look for a small alley with a sign above it that says “Sunny Video Indian Movies.” Often open only during the daytime.

Food Loft
top floor, Central Chidlom department store, at the corner of Ploenchit Road and Soi Chidlom, is in the central business district; (66-2) 793-7070; http://www.central.co.th/.

The best areas for street snacks include the side streets off of Yaowarat Road, in Chinatown; Talad Loong Perm (Loong Perm market), on 89 Vibhavadi-Rangsit Road, is in the northern part of Bangkok, just behind the Thai Airways building.