Bangkok Food Tour!

I blame Thailand for the crazy desire I have to go everywhere… including back to Thailand.

Thailand was incredible. INCREDIBLE. Yes, I was incredibly jet-lagged and craving Western food by the time I returned home. Yes, I sweated through my clothes and took two showers a day on a regular basis there. Yes, I walked a ton and my feet hurt constantly from all the “see everything” daily plans. It was so worth it! I highly recommend travelling to Thailand if you can stand the long flight (about 20 hours plus a layover in Tokyo coming from ATL).

When people ask why I picked Thailand, I have three reasons I give them:  the food, the beaches, and the exchange rate. None of those things disappointed.

I planned this trip after an enormous amount of research. We started in Bangkok. This was a great idea, because if there is one word to describe the city, it would be “clusterfuck.” In a good way, of course. Pardon my language, but there’s really no other way to explain the chaos that is Bangkok. It smells more than occasionally of shrimp paste and hot garbage, and there are people crawling all over the place constantly. There are street vendors galore, shrines to Buddha at every business and home, and yes, hookers. Once, I’m pretty sure I some ladies of the night doing the traditional Thai bow to a Buddhist shrine and leaving a few offerings at the start of their evening. Hey, why not right? I also played some board games at a bar with some flirtatious girls who may or may not have been on the job as well.

The reason it was great to start the trip in Bangkok is because this city will run you ragged. Combine its average year-round temperature of 81 degrees [Fahrenheit] with the lack of a cool breeze between buildings and the need to walk and use an array of public transit to get around town – buses, taxis, tuk tuks, Skytrain, boats, oh my- we were exhausted! And the heat only added to it. At the end of every day, we either partied… or struggled to stay awake past 9 PM. It’s an addictive, if exhausting, fabulous city!

After (almost) seamlessly finding the apartment we rented through Airbnb , we bought snacks from a convenient store located in our building and went to bed early to prepare for our first day on the town with Bangkok Food Tours. I did bitch a little about wanting to go out that first night to all the neon van bars parked on the streets in Sukhumvit, but Charlie was the voice of reason. Sleep was a good choice.

After reading tons of TripAdvisor reviews, I planned a food tour to get acquainted with Bangkok. I think it’s a great way to get your bearings in a new city, especially when there’s a language barrier involved. We got accustomed to approaching street food vendors and other locals, which can initially be pretty intimidating at first. The food tour was a fun way to explore neighborhoods of Bangkok while having a local Thai guide order food for us from vetted, quality places. You get a little bit of culture and a lot of food.

Bangkok Food Tour

When we arrived at the tour meeting point, we already felt surrounded by a mecca of street food, but it was really just a little gathering of vendors outside of the Skytrain station. They were selling knock-off purses and there was a guy singing karaoke from a portable speaker system- obviously I had to tip him and take his picture. We wanted to try the pad Thai, dumplings, and some unidentifiable foods we saw while we awaited our group, but I knew from reviews of the food tour that we shouldn’t eat yet, not even breakfast. We were about to get plenty.

Our tour guide Nushi (I’m spelling it phonetically here okay; it rhymes with “sushi”) was very knowledgeable and introduced us to local store owners, taking us to places we would never have even noticed on our own. We walked around the historic area of Bangkok known as Bangrak and tried everything from duck to curries to pastries. I even met a guy from North Carolina who had gone to Emory Law School and just taken the bar exam too… small world. There were also some folks from Hong Kong and India. We all had a great time. Anyway, now for the food pictures of the Bangkok Food Tour:

First stop: A little family owned shop known for its roast duck.

 

Roast duck, gravy, rice, with ginger and cucumber. You could even try some duck innards and feet if you liked!

Our tour group at the table on our first stop. Satisfied.

 

A local selling his produce. Don’t ask me what everything is. This is the kind of site I expected to see all over Thailand, and I did.

 

Just a little snack on our route: Fried bananas.

 

Next Stop: A Muslim-owned restaurant where we could try an excellent yellow curry noodle dish with chicken or beef. This woman plated our dishes one at a time in front of us.

The ubiquitous condiments on every table in Thailand – spicy, sweet, sour, salty. I love this idea and wish I could have these flavors at my disposal in restaurants at home.

These are the muslim yellow chicken curry noodles. Delicious! I’m pretty sure I dreamed of these before coming to Thailand. And after.

We crossed the river by ferry and our guide led us into a shanty little restaurant to try some traditional Isan food. This cuisine hails from the northeastern region of Thailand and was by far the spiciest of all the things we ate all day. This food incorporates a lot of sour flavors as well. I loved it! It may have been our group’s favorite of the day.  Charlie and I actually had our first ever taste of Isan-style food at the DC restaurant Little Serow (it’s outrageously good!).

A woman making som tam, spicy green papaya salad.

There were definitely no tourists eating around this area of Bangkok and it was awesome to see the family cooking everything from poultry to whole fish. This restaurant backed up to a tiny walkway and other people’s backyards just steps from the river. Everything was definitely fresh; the fruits, vegetables, and fish were all from super close by. The catfish had just been fried.Unrelated, this was also where I used my first eastern toilet… a hole in the ground at the back of the restaurant.

Som tam and spicy pork salad. Excellent

Fried catfish. Mmmmm, light and crispy, salty and warm. Also, there’s my new favorite condiment, one of the things I miss the most- vinegar with red and green Thai chilies.

Some tasty fried chicken topped with fried lemongrass (such a good idea!)

There was nothing left at the end of this feast – everything was fantastic.

The next stop on our Bangkok Food Tour was a bakery and pastry shop. There were tons of things to buy here that would have been great for afternoon tea or coffee or to take home as gifts and, of course, a TripAdvisor sticker on the front window. We tried two buns each- a green custard and a barbecue bun- and then either an iced tea or iced coffee.

A soft sweet bun filled with well-seasoned pork. Unexpected… but I think this could really take off in North Carolina

A Thai iced tea and the center of the green custard bun. The Thai teas are made with condensed milk and are really sweet but oddly refreshing and tasty

A stink bean vendor

The final stop was an actual indoor sit-down restaurant with lots of suit-wearing, business-professional types, complete with air conditioning and Western toilets. Although we’d gotten used to the casual, curbside dining, everything here was great too. However, for the rest of our trip, we didn’t see the inside of many more restaurants like this.Here, I learned that I am not the biggest fan of baby Thai eggplant. They served them in the green curry and I bit into them thinking they were peas… not so much. They are bitter and not a traditionally Western taste. It was good to learn early though, because they made a frequent appearance throughout our trip.

A sample size of traditional Thai green curry and roti (an Indian-inspired crispy pancake-like bread).

I was actually scared of the final dish of the food tour… but incredibly pumped to try it! Durian ice cream. I have seen so many TV shows about this fruit. People complain about the texture and the smell. Some hotels, including the one we stayed in while in Chiang Mai, put up signs forbidding you from bringing it into your hotel rooms because the smell is so bad and difficult to get out.

It’s known as the “king of fruits,” but woof, that smell. Ice cream was possibly the most innocuous way to try it for the first time. You could still grasp the odd taste and texture, and the smell crept up on you in an unidentifiable way, but it wasn’t bad. One guy at our table said, “If I didn’t know this was durian-flavored, I might say this ice cream had gone bad.” Other words people threw out to describe the taste were “rotten meat,” “macadamian nuts,” “garbage,” and “dirty socks.” Yum.

I totally recommend Bangkok Food Tours and Nushi. I would go back right now and do all the different tours they offer. (Maybe I will one day!) There’s also a nighttime tour of Bangkok’s Chinatown that sounds amazing! The food was fabulous and now all I can think about is going back to eat more Thai street food. Historic Bangrak Food Tasting Tour costs 1050 Baht (about $32 USD). Tours are held Monday through Saturday from 9:45 AM until about 1:45 PM. For this particular tour, groups meet at Exit 3 of the Saphan Taksin BTS (Skytrain) Station.