Eating My Way Through Bangkok
I am always amazed at the number of tourists that come to Southeast Asia and crowd into the local McDonalds, KFC, and Sizzler for dinner. Local cuisine is part of the experience, and part of why we go to foreign countries.
There are many fine, elegant restaurants near Bangkok's downtown Sukhumvit Road area, many of which tone down the spicy factor and weird ingredient quotient to accommodate the foreign traveler. They have menus written in English. Some of these offer excellent entertainment, have a vast wine collection with some of the finest Bordeaux, and by Western standards, are still eminently affordable.
We didn't go to any of those places.
During my first few weeks in Bangkok, before I had learned to speak any appreciable amount of Thai, my lovely Thai fiancée (whose name is completely unpronounceable to Westerners) would order food for me when we went to a restaurant. My first taste of Thai food in Thailand was indeed a trial by fire.
Throughout Thailand, there are places called "footpath restaurants." Barely a restaurant at all by Western standards, these restaurants appear every evening on sidewalks throughout Thailand. The proprietor carries the entire establishment in the back of a pickup truck, and at around 4:00, backs the pickup onto the sidewalk, offloads several well-used plastic tables and stools, a couple woks and a propane tank, and sets up shop out in the open. About thirty minutes later, dinner is served and the lines start forming. Not quite sure how dishes get washed, since there is no running water, but they do generally appear to be clean. Stray dogs start milling about, and the cook usually throws the scraps into a little plastic bowl on the ground for the mutts. One of them showed up beside our table, looking up at us hopefully, and then gratefully accepted our offering.
The menus are in Thai only. My Thai bride-to-be ordered for both of us. The food was nothing like what I had been accustomed to in Thai restaurants back in the US, but the place, across the street from Kasetsart University, seemed to be popular with the local college student crowd, probably because you can fill up for about a dollar. I enjoyed the food immensely. Our table was adjacent to the curb and the only dinner music was the occasional blare of a car radio as traffic went by. As I mopped by sweating brow, perspiring partly due to the overwhelming heat of Bangkok and partly due to the presence of more chiles than most doctors would recommend, I sampled some small crunchy things, and also found them quite enjoyable. After eating several of them I asked my fiancée what they were. "Oh, those are fried fish bladders," she said, matter-of-factly, as if they were as common as French fries.
If you are going to sample the "real" cuisine, there are certain foods that are enjoyable, but you are better off not knowing what they are. Nonetheless, they were delicious.
In the rural areas of Thailand and in some of the more "back-street" markets in Bangkok, you will occasionally come across a vendor selling fried beetles. While in nearby Cambodia, I sampled a bag of deep-fried fish skeletons. No fish meat on them, just bones, with bits of skin still hanging off. A local delicacy, eaten as a snack like potato chips, these little delights were crunchy and tasty, and went down quite well with a cold brew. If you wish to skip the bones and just eat the skins, fried fish skins are also a local favorite throughout Southeast Asia, and many of the local restaurants serve it.
These are a people that don't waste any part of the fish. My future father-in-law's favorite dish is fish head soup. And unlike Westerners, who like to eat fish that no longer looks like a fish, ordering fish in a Thai restaurant here will yield you an entire fish, head still on, sitting on a plate looking back at you. The meat on the head is considered exceptionally good. Shrimp and prawns too, are served whole, with the head still on. The native way to eat a prawn is to not only eat the large meaty tail, but also to pull off the head and suck out the goo inside of it; then put the bit that has the legs inside your mouth, chew off any remaining meat, and spit back out the legs.
Eating at these places is unusual, but always an exciting experience. The food is surprisingly tasty. There are, however, a few rare occasions when I forget my politeness and can't help letting loose with a loud, "Yuckkkkkkkkkk" upon putting some particularly vile thing into my mouth. This has happened only twice. Once when eating a piece of durian--a tropical fruit considered to be a rare delicacy, but tastes something like a piece of rotten fish that has been soaked in sour milk; and once when being presented with something that is colloquially known as "kai yiew maa" (politely translated loosely as "eggs soaked in horse urine"). The latter had such a vile smell that I could not bring myself to even be at the same table with it, much less attempt to eat it. I was told later it is usually consumed with large amounts of alcohol.
Indulge in that Big Mac if you must, but during your stay in Thailand, enjoy a night out at a footpath restaurant at least once for a wonderfully fun adventure in eating.
