The Missing Ingredient: Notes from the Streets of Southeast Asia: January 2013

Thailand gets 14 million people a year visiting it's shores. This is for good reason. The country is stunning, it is calm and in general traveling there does not make you do with out. All services and products are on sale in Bangkok, Thailand. I visited Bangkok first because I needed to get my visa to the land of Myanmar or Burma. I had not spent time in Thailand since I first traveled to Asia in 2005 after recently graduating. I was looking for the Bangkok that the luxury outlets had forgotten. In an old issue of the Art of Eating there was an article about the shophouses of Chinatown.

So many of the iconic dishes come from the combination over time of the Chinese and native Thai's ingredients commingling especially in this area. Although it is Chinatown, I personally did not hear any Mandarin being spoken. I took the underground Subway to the nearest station and began walking. Chinatown is located in an area of Thailand that has not seen the highrises or new urban development. The buildings look like they were constructed in the 1960s. The combination of smog and tropical heat ages these buildings so they look much older than they really are. Walking past rows of shophouses gives you all of the familiar scents of any other china town. The dried smells of the Chinese medicine shops the smell of incense in front of clouded shrines.

This is the Bangkok I like, a place where things look lived in and that there is a sense of history. However grimy it has lots more character than the space ship like malls that dot the sky train lines. I kept wandering on main and side streets, taking photos and stopping into places that looked like they had something good to eat.

The first meal of the day was at this restaurant which seemed to serve just one dish. The dish I was served was some bok choy, slightly cooked pork (meaning it was a tender as a soft butter) and a very strange sauce made up of cornstarch and soy and other ingredients. This was all over a bed of white rice noodles. Not only was it good but it had a sense of history and was very tranquil. A great restaurant can silence people sometimes. After my meal I continued wandering through malls where people were selling illicit pornography (porn is illegal in Thailand) and a multitude of different enhancement pills and balms. This was all crammed in between turbo saws, and light fixtures in this jumbled market place. After a while as I was walking I spotted something really strange in a store. After peeking in I discovered the Little Shop of Horrors Venus fly trap in life size.

This was to strange not to inquire. I entered and was greeted by a nice family that spoke good English. Somehow one of the suns had created this for some class project and the family had liked it so much that they decided to keep it and not throw it out. It was such a random moment to see one of the most famous characters and my favorite in a shop window in Chinatown. As I looked around the room I discovered a stack of records. I love records and have collected from around the world like people collect sand from their travels abroad. I asked if the family knew where I could find some record shops or places to buy Thai music. The woman knew right away, after five minutes of waiting I was whisked off by moto Taxi to another part of Chinatown where there were a row of amazing record stores.

Just before a torrential downpour started I entered this shop where there were stacks of Lps lining the shelves. In broken English the storeowner helped me to find some good music and allowed me to shoot photos of the place. Thailand is one of the few countries where there is a lot of Vinyl. The country was at least more prosperous in the 1960s and 1970s than their neighbors and thus their was a larger market for record companies to sell their products. In a later post I am going to start posting some music from these travels. Music is such an immediate entry point into a culture just like food or in my case skateboarding. You can without much knowledge of the other persons language communicate over a shared interest in something. On this 4 month journey to Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, China and finally back to Vietnam, music was a way for me to get to know more about a place and meet new people.

After a great couple of hours I kept walking around enjoying the little bits of colonial architecture that still exist in Chinatown. I happened upon a great little stall where I indulged in a great dish of fish larp and green chicken curry.

Bangkok is really the king of street food. There is good stuff on other major cities streets but sheer size of the scene and the relative quality of all the people involved it makes it hard no to choose this gigantic metropolis. For a buck and a half I walked away filled looking to find my way out of Chinatown.

The next day I went with a rookie to Southeast Asia to the grand palace and some of the other major tourist sites. Even though the royal palace is ground zero for tourism in Bangkok the beauty of it and size make it a great place to return to. I did this during the day and came back to the hostel to take a shower and relax for a bit. In my room I met a Brasilian guy who was up to try this great restaurant that I had been reading about for quite a number of years. Since I read something about Chotechitr in an old food mag five years ago and having since heard an NPR radio broadcast about this place I had to get there.

After a little bit of trouble finding the place we found this glowing beacon close to the Royal palace. For such a famous place its little dining room was utterly empty. I wondered sadly that we had shown up to late. Thankfully it was open and turned out that they were really only open for another half hour. We ordered a duck salad, Mi grob, and a chu che curry (taste like a lite red curry to me). The food was as good as the radio broadcast and articles had said. There was an attention to detail about the spice of the curry and the Mi grob was not to sweet but sweet enough. I make this dish so differently that it was great to taste a classic version for comparison. It was a fitting way to end my time in Bangkok and now my taste buds were primed for the North of Thailand. Here are a bunch of pictures from my time in Bangkok.