Bangkok’s street food is changing. From humble stalls to Michelin-starred restaurants, the city’s vendors are working hard to keep its culinary traditions alive. Read on for a deep dive into the Thai capital’s street food culture.
Chinatown food stalls
It’s 2011 and I’ve just published my first street food guide, Bangkok’s Top 50 Street Food Stalls. The excellence of Jay Fai’s cooking was one of the things that inspired the book in the first place. Proud of my accomplishment and eager to present it to my muse, I give Jay Fai (real name Supinya Junsuta) her very own copy. I soon discover, to my horror, that she’s not so pleased to be in this book. “I’m in the same book as them?” she asks, waving a dismissive hand at the pad thai shop next door. She might have a point — what she cooks is a different proposition to what’s on offer at the noodle shop down the road (although both are famous).
A lot has changed since 2011. The stall now has a Michelin star, and people wait as long as four hours for the honor of taking a seat in her open-air, green-tiled dining room. Street food is a bona fide global phenomenon, a buzzword for savvy restaurateurs and shorthand for a person who’s cool and adventurous — a la Mark Wiens. Under the name ‘Marktiplier,’ he first began his YouTube career in 2012, the same year he published his e-book, The Eating Thai Food Guide.
Damnoen Saduak floating market
Today, Mark has more than 11 million subscribers on his main YouTube account and can be seen on TV screens all over the world. But when he first came to Thailand, he was struck by the very same things that moved me about street food: the feeling of real lives unfolding over cold mugs of beers and steaming bowls of noodles, people laughing on plastic stools as traffic whizzed by. It felt like a shortcut to diving into Thai culture.
“It’s not only about eating — it’s a full sensory experience,” says Mark. “When I first came to Bangkok, I was amazed at how so many food stalls and markets were open air — there was stir-frying, deep-frying, grilling and salad pounding — all like a live culinary theater right in front of you.”
Silom street food
WHERE IT ALL STARTED
Of course, you can’t talk about Thai street food without discussing its birthplace: Yaowarat, or Bangkok’s Chinatown. It’s where many Chinese people settled during the reigns of Rama I to III, making their fortunes doing the jobs that wealthy Thais didn’t want to do. “The Chinese rented row shophouses and started with noodle shops, small restaurants and so on,” says chef McDang, a Thai food scholar and popular TV personality, whose favorite Chinatown stop, like mine, is the oyster omelet stand Nai Mong Hoi Thod. “As time went by, tables selling snacks to take home were placed in front of some of the shophouses, so the shops began to spill out onto the street. That’s really how street food as we know it today was born.”
Chinatown is now a major tourist destination, packed to the gills with people who throng the sidewalks to see flaming woks and exotic fruits. Indeed, the image of the wok hei (breath of the wok) master is so pervasive here that it’s hard to imagine Thai street food without it — even though, as with much Thai street food today, the wok (and noodles, and won tons and rice porridge) are Chinese inventions.
“Most modern cooks in Thailand are familiar with wok cooking as a result of their exposure to street food when they were growing up, especially the young chefs,” says chef Dylan Eitharong of popular restaurant Haawm, whose favorite place in Chinatown is rice porridge shop Jay Suay (incidentally right next to Nai Mong). “Street food has influenced how we think of Thai cuisine, because we generally think of it all as street food, which isn’t the case.”
Tha Kha floating market
ON THE CANALS
Perhaps a better way to understand how street food came to be is to imagine how Bangkok used to be, crisscrossed with canals that residents used as a means to travel around the capital. Back then, vendors sold food on rowboats, while touts offered snacks along the waterways. Sadly, most canals in Bangkok have been filled in, but visitors can get a glimpse of what the past might have looked like by traveling an hour and a half south of Bangkok to Amphawa Floating Market.
Kaeng Phed Ped Yang (roasted duck in red curry)
This market has proven the most popular tour offered by Chin Chongtong of Chili Paste Tour, which focuses on daily, highly personalized outings for small groups. It’s little surprise why: Amphawa draws thousands of tourists each weekend with its colorful, fruit-laden boats and fireflies that start flickering by the roots of the lamphu trees as dusk comes around. “I like everything; the fruit, the snacks, the people, the ingredients — and also the fireflies,” says Chin. But even she’s noticed a change in the street food scene in this new post-Covid Thailand.
“Street food has changed a lot. The government has stopped some places from operating and also, due to ongoing construction, vendors are having to leave their former base because the rent is now too high and they can’t find new premises.”
Khao Phing Kan, Phuket
WHAT’S THE FUTURE?
With the current street food scene divided by shopping malls with rival food courts and convenience store chains, Bangkok is at something of a crossroads in terms of a vision for what its street food will look like. After retracting its initial comments that street food vendors would be cleared from all sidewalks in the capital, the municipal government appears to be restricting operators to select areas, and lately, vetting potential vendors on their suitability. Initially, many assumed that the government would eventually set up hawker centers like Singapore, but prime real estate set aside for street food and not condos or shopping malls is hard to find.
Wat Arun (the Temple of Dawn) and Chao Phraya River
Enter Bantad Thong Road, a street lined with restaurants, shophouses and vendors on both sides. The energy here is palpable: the same neon lights and plethora of options as in Yaowarat, without so many of the tour buses. Although it was meant to provide space for displaced vendors, critics say the street is simply more corporate fare dressed up in street food clothing, hosting major food chains, branches of street vendors who made it big and popular Chinese outlets.
“I see this as a consequence of prioritizing corporate and private developer needs over the rights of street food vendors,” says University of Manchester lecturer Dr. Trude Renwick. “I don’t see this as the future of street food, but as a growing phenomenon that’s part of the larger street food world.”
Others, like Phil Cornwel-Smith, author of Very Bangkok, seem more resigned, unsurprised that small independent vendors are being pushed out by bigger corporate interests. “It’s the next phase of street food becoming an institutional standard and branded identity.”
This means that a vendor like Jay Fai, who took to selling noodles after her seamstress shop burned down, wouldn’t be able to make it in today’s Bangkok. As a result, it leads to the kind of mentality some tourists have when on safari: experience this while you still can. And don’t forget to visit the nearest 7-Eleven (there are more than 4,000 of them in the city) to pick up a packet of Jay Fai’s very own Shin Ramyun instant noodles.
By Chawadee Nualkhair
