Street food stories: Thailand

Scorpions and the "most dangerous region"

Hungry with Ideas is a free email newsletter about food and travel. This post is part of a series about street food around the world. Check out the most recent post about Sicily and drop your email below to get the next one straight to your inbox.

Street food in Bangkok’s Chinatown

There’s something mystical about street food – the idea of an entire kitchen’s worth of utensils and gadgets reduced to a single pull cart, or the back of a truck, or even a few pots and pans and a worn gas burner set out on the sidewalk.

Street food transcends time, place, and culture. Whether it’s arancine formed by hand in a Palermo market, grilled corn on the side of the road in Egypt, or roti drizzled with sweetened condensed milk on a busy Thai street corner, virtually everywhere you travel, you’ll find some iteration of a vendor selling a single product to be eaten on the go.

And since street food is cheap, quick, and meant for locals, it’s often emblematic of a country’s cuisine. Just ask any European what they consider “American food” and they’ll probably tell you a hot dog from a New York food truck.

When I arrived in Bangkok last year in February, I was immediately struck by the Thai societal dependence on street food. A friend living there told me that many Thai apartments barely have a kitchen. Why bother cooking when ready-made food is so cheap, delicious, and easy to find?

No matter how early I left my hotel in the morning, I had to zigzag around the numerous vendors who had already set up shop right outside the door. Men and women in stylish suits and skirts clutched clear plastic bags full of soup or creamy rice porridge as they rushed onto the metro.

At night, the city’s Chinatown strip came alive with hundreds of carts and stalls selling everything from fresh coconut ice cream and grilled seafood to sausage balls and jet-black scorpions on sticks (although heavily photographed by tourists including myself, I never saw a Thai person purchase one.)

Lines formed in front of the most well-known carts and shops including one selling grilled buns oozing with sweet fillings. The noise from a boulevard packed shoulder-to-shoulder with happy, hungry people meant I had to yell to ask my husband which one of a seemingly infinite number of delicacies he wanted to try. After filling our stomachs, we found a bit of respite down a side street, where Buddhist monks in orange robes burned incense in front of an ornate temple.

After a week in Bangkok, I had eaten my fill, both from street food stalls and in attractive and efficient mall food courts (and once in the extravagant food court of ICONSIAM, where the entire ground floor is designed to look like a floating market full of street food stalls – but with much-appreciated air conditioning!) 

ICONSIAM is a must-visit when in Bangkok.

Yet, there was one item high on my list that I had not yet eaten – the Thai roti pancake.

I’m obsessed with pancakes in all shapes and forms (see My Year in Pancakes) so I kept my eyes peeled for the Thai roti ladies whose carts piled high with fresh bananas and cans of sweetened condensed milk are part of Bangkok folklore. I’m not sure whether I had poor timing or just wasn’t looking in the right places, but I didn’t find roti until I traveled south.

Roti with fresh coconut

I finally got my hands on it in Koh Lipe, a popular tourist destination and an island with the dreamy blue water you expect to see when you book a trip to Thailand. The best part about roti in tourist destinations is that you can order it sweet or savory at breakfast. Paired with a giant, sweet and milky Thai iced espresso (Italians, you’ve been warned!) it's the perfect carb rush to kick start a blazing hot day at the beach.

Koh Lipe

Up until this point, I had been on the beaten path of Thai street food. It was fabulous! delicious! exciting! but also what had been experienced by numerous travelers before me.

A market in Hat Yai.

Then we went to Hat Yai, a medium-sized city on the border with Malaysia before carrying on further south to the province of Pattani. Unlike elsewhere in Thailand, a large percentage of the residents of southern Thailand are practicing Muslims of Malay origin and even have special permits allowing them to cross the border with Malaysia as much as they wish. We went to visit friends living there, and soon found out that many Thais consider the area relatively dangerous because of recent attacks on police and military personnel.

“People here like that the rest of the country think it’s dangerous,” our friend said while we ate a ridiculously spicy meal at a cozy outdoor restaurant one evening. “That way they leave us in peace!”

Indeed, after piling three of us onto a scooter, a trip around town revealed a bustling city full of cute cafes, trendy restaurants, outdoor flea markets, immaculate mosques, and buzzing street food stands, all full of locals shopping and eating – with not a single tourist in sight.

On our final night in Thailand in Hat Yai, we treated ourselves to a different menu of Thai street food that we hadn’t found in Bangkok, including crispy roasted chicken thighs and rice chopped plated by a woman who really knew how to wield a cleaver. I bought freshly sliced mango for less than a dollar and then we waited in line for roti, this time at a cart run by a man.

After dinner, we wandered around for a while until we heard yelling and cheering in a park. It turned out to be a group of men jumping and contorting themselves in an impressive game of Sepak Takraw (imagine volleyball, but played with your feet!) So we sat and watched for a while, mesmerized, with stomachs and hearts filled to the brim.