Thai Food I: Street Food

It took me quite awhile after arriving to Thailand to get into the food. It was not because a dislike of Thai food, since it is one of my favorite foods in the US, more more a dislike of where one eats Thai food. The restaurant culture of the US, India, and every other place I have been does not really exist here. There are restaurants, just not Thai ones. It seems that Thais will go a nice enclosed AC restaurant to have pizza, Chinese, or any non-Thai food. However, except in Bangkok, all Thai restaurants if not catering directly to tourists or in a 5-star hotel, are ramshackle open-air establishments or food carts.

The carts are not really permanent, since they are put up and taken down everyday, but they occupy the same location every night. They all have wheels to be pushed away at the end of the night. They do not have running water. They do have electricity and even meters to presumably pay someone for the power. The prices are all between 5 and 40 baht (10 - 80 cents). The ambiance matches the price - you eat on metal folding tables and plastic stools. Many are arranged in the same place to constitute a day or night food market. Some are simply a swerer or fruit seller attached to a sidecar.

In India street food is either sworn off or you know it will cost you some serious bathroom time. We had great hesitation in delving into the multitude of street eats. During our first week here, we ate primarily at tourist restaurants, which besides McDonald's, this is the place you can go to guarantee eating the worst food any locale has to offer. Slowly, as we saw more Westerners eating from them and not in the hospital with IVs, we too entered into the makeshift street restaurants.

What do they serve? Everything on a menu of a typical US Thai restaurant and more. The diversity is stunning. Curry carts offer over 10 types of succulent meat and vegetable curries. Soup carts offer something akin to Vietnamese Pho with sliced meat or shrimp, or duck. There were numerous BBQ carts with various processed meats creatively sculpted on the wooden skewer. The carts catering more to Thais include BBQed hanging offal, looking much like an anatomy class. There were stir-fry and pad Thai carts. Many served various types of iced tea - black, chrysanthemum, hibiscus, and ginger finished with condensed milk. Dessert carts had banana and nutella crepes, silver dollar pancakes filled with a coconut mixture. On every corner is a fruit cart filled with carved and chilled pineapple, banana, mango, dragon fruit, jack fruit, and watermelon whether for immediate consumption or to be whipped into a shake. The one I always looked out for was the mango and sticky rice cart. At first I scoffed at such a pedestrian dessert made with rice. However, it's hard to describe the unbelievable marriage of a silky fragrant mango with slightly salty, sweet, coconut stewed rice.

After a month in Thailand, food carts instilled in me, rather than fear and terror, a Pavlovian response of salivation. Some of the best food we had in Thailand came from these lowly eateries. Next post - more about specific dishes.