Bangkok Glutton

Bangkok’s street food future? A vendor at a wet market on the Thonburi side of the river

I come from a family of hypochondriacs. My sister has gone to the emergency room for an undiagnosed case of SARS (it wasn’t SARS) and because she thought she was going deaf (she wasn’t going deaf). My mother, who thinks she is suffering from all sorts of strange ailments and visits the doctor about once a week, is always being told how healthy she is and will probably live to the age of 100. But of my family’s doom-filled women, I am of course the queen. I diagnose myself with a host of diseases on the regular, with the help of the trusty old Internet. You know when you hear about strange people who are always visiting sites like WebMD and you think, “At least I’m not one of them”? Well, here I are. I’m one of them.

Here, let’s look up my Google search history. A quick scan comes up with … “Invincible” soundtrack (what was I thinking?); chronic pulmonary disease; Eat Me menu; tapeworm symptoms; tapeworm in brain; reddit Game of Thrones night’s king theory; asthma symptoms; Jack White dancing gif; jack white ass (THESE TWO TOPICS ARE RELATED OK); stroke symptoms; stroke test FAST; Ledu head chef Ton (what is this dude’s last name? I still can’t find it); Q&A Bar Bangkok; fluttering in stomach; tapeworm symptoms.

Looking through that, it would seem like I think I am going to die — of a stroke, serious respiratory problems, a tapeworm in my brain, or something I haven’t thought up yet, like stress from worrying about these things. But it’s not really about dying, per se. It’s more about maintaining a constant, strong vigilance: if you think about these things enough, they won’t happen, right? Isn’t that the way the world works?

A Chinatown gravy noodle vendor’s mise-en-place

So when I think about Sukhumvit 38 eventually closing (yes, still), and how this could be a harbinger of how Bangkok is going to treat its street food in the future, it’s more of that … just thinking, a kind of vigilance, a mental chant to ward off the worst case scenario. In fact, at this very moment, the closure of Sukhumvit 38’s street food area is not even that bad. The entire left side of the soi has found a home in the food court of the Gateway Mall near Ekamai. The right side has not, but the little sub-soi where the pad Thai guy and mango sticky rice ladies are located doesn’t even have to move. And the landlords have done well out of all of it, making off with a rumored 2 billion baht. I’m not even gonna hate on these landlords. I mean, if I was presented with 2 billion baht, I would do exactly the same thing, I’m not gonna lie. In fact, if you have $76.13, you can have this very blog.

But I’m not going to stick my head in the sand and say things might stay the way they’ve always been forever more. I can tell which way the wind is blowing. Let me think of another cliche: I can read the writing on the wall. We are now at that particular point in time when landlords are going to sell their properties, where places are going to gentrify and be developed. We could see Bangkok following the Singapore model, where vendors are all herded into certain “centers” located throughout the city. This model sucks for several reasons: it would drastically cut down on the number of vendors, hence limiting creativity and, ultimately, the drive to compete. The food would be set in stone, and never evolve. We could go the Tokyo way, where everything is basically ushered indoors, unless it’s earmarked for tourists or very, very drunk people. You can see where the problem lies in that. And finally, we could do like Hong Kong and obliterate it almost completely. I couldn’t even tell you how much that would blow.  Where would everyone eat? Not everyone can afford eating in yet another godforsaken shopping mall, and a big part of why people visit Bangkok would be lost.

What I hope for is that, as Bangkok progresses, a typically “Thai” solution for street food’s future will develop, with the same brand of creativity, spontaneity, eye for convenience and mild contempt for regulation that Thai people have always displayed. Hopefully, they will display it at a place somewhere close to me in the near future.

The work station of a Sukhumvit som tum vendor

Grilled snails on the street at Sukhumvit 38

Unless something really, really sucks, we usually want things to stay the same. That’s why progress, when it comes, always throws us for a loop. So with the news that the street food area at the entrance to Sukhumvit Soi 38 will soon be replaced by a spanking new development, I find myself as perplexed as the next old person with a lawn, and as much in denial:

1. How could this happen when it is so popular, with both tourists and locals?

2. ANOTHER property development? How could they be so short-sighted?

And then, 3. How could they do this to me?

Because, as much as other street food places have (and soon will) find themselves homeless in the path of the powerful god of gentrification (see: Bamee Rungrueang on Sukhumvit 26; Tang Meng Noodle near Sukhumvit 49), this is the first one to really hit home. Where else will the mango sticky rice ladies greet me, where I can bump into my parents on the way to the egg noodle vendor, where the Thai dessert stall ladies can completely ignore me? Where else will I be able to find a complete street food ecosystem — organically grown, spontaneously grouped, and dare I say “authentic” — a mere 5-minute motorcycle taxi ride away?

Thai street food has become a home for me in a lot of different ways. It’s given me plenty of fodder to write about; it’s nourished me with food that has been occasionally mind-blowing; it’s taught me a lot about how Thais live and interact with each other. It’s also provided me with a sort of community where I feel welcomed and included — Sukhumvit 38 was a part of that. And, yes, the fiery woks, sweating, beanie-clad cooks, plastic chairs and tables wreathed in steam from a just-cooked bowl of noodles, sidewalks grimed in picturesque squalor, all of this served as a reminder that I was indeed in Thailand, and that it felt like nowhere else on earth. For me, Thailand is all about this sense of spontaneity, of possibility and anything waiting for you just around the corner — even maybe the best meal you’ve had yet.

But Thailand is changing, and street food with it. Some of Sukhumvit 38’s vendors will sink into retirement, and some will find new homes, probably in a food court at one of the city’s inexhaustible supply of new malls. That would be a shame, because as nice as it is to sit in air-conditioning for a while, the food somehow seems nowhere near as good. It’s funny, really: having said repeatedly that “it’s all about the food”, I find myself realizing that the secret ingredient in a lot of the stuff I sample is sitting streetside or in the shophouse, hobbled by inconveniences, surrounded by strangers. Sitting with everything laid out for me on a tray, utensils helpfully provided, makes the food seem picayune in comparison, something to fill my stomach until I have something better to do. The food is no longer the destination. To think that this is probably the future for Thai street food makes me want to stick my head in a vat of McDonald’s french fries.

Yet Bangkok is still full of streets just like mine, where a curry rice lady shares space with a noodle guy just down the road from my house. I only need to walk a few steps to get an old-fashioned cup of Thai iced coffee from a woman who has been there for the last 50 years, and the ice cream guy and Isaan sausage guy go past my house in the afternoons. Only a couple of months ago, I opened the door to find that a made-to-order vendor had set up shop right next to me. Street food as I know it is still around. I’m going to make sure to try the made-to-order guy the next time I see him.

Banana leaf curry at Raja Restaurant in Kuala Lumpur

Throughout the years on this blog, I have pretty much demonstrated a Taliban-like commitment to eating Thai food the way Thai people eat it. It seemed like a no-brainer to me because a fork and spoon are so obviously the best eating utensils ever created. Why on earth would you struggle with a fork or, god forbid, a pair of chopsticks, when presented with a curry and a plate of jasmine rice? Because, no duh, the best way to eat something is the way locals have been doing it for years, and that this was obviously a rule that would apply to every cuisine, no matter what.

Then I went to Vietnam, and discovered that I have been eating the Vietnamese fried crepe — banh xeo, supposedly named after the sound the batter makes when dropped into a sizzling pan — wrong for years. It turns out the brittle, shell-like crepe is not the vehicle for the herbs: it’s the herbs that are meant to enclose the crepe, the leaves rolled up like an egg roll and dotted inside with bits of crepe crunch like croutons before they are dipped in a sweet-tart sauce and brought to the mouth.

Banh xeo, or stuffed Vietnamese crepe

Somehow, in all my years of patronizing Vietnamese restaurants all over the globe, no one thought to tell me that Vietnamese people eat their crepes differently than I was eating my crepe. They would just set the plate on my table and walk away, possibly resisting the urge to tell me, just like I resist/don’t resist the urge to tell other people, “You are doing it all wrong”. They simply seemed happy that I was there. This is because Vietnamese waiters are better people than me.

I was resolved to learn from my mistakes and to eat things properly from then on. But what happens when you don’t want to do it, even when presented with incontrovertible evidence that you’re DOIN IT ALL RONG? When our friend May took us to a banana curry leaf place called Raja Restaurant on a recent trip to Kuala Lumpur, I was forced to face this very question.

Because, let me tell you, eating gloppy food with bare hands is definitely my gastro-Achilles heel. Meaning, THERE IS NO WAY THAT IS HAPPENING. I mean, I’m Northern Thai and I can barely eat sticky rice with my fingers. The thought of all that unseen hand guck coating those grains of rice just makes me want to scrape my tongue with a chainsaw. So apologies, banana leaf curry originators. To the first people who thought of tearing a leaf off of a tree, tipping delicious curries from pails onto those leaves with a hefty mound of rice and a dollop of pickles and then having at it with their gross-ass bare hands, I say: hell naw. I say, I’m sorry. I say, it’s great you are eco-friendly and all, but thank God for the fork and spoon. Cuz when I see people doing like they’re supposed to and eating banana leaf curry with their hands, the grains of wet rice sticking to their fingers as they maneuver their way through their meal, it makes me think of this:

Stuff I would rather do than eat wet curry rice with my hands

1. Get a painful charlie horse in the middle of a great dream
2. Wear a repurposed garbage bag for two weeks
3. Go to a Michael Buble concert
4. Wash my face with sand
5. Drink creme de menthe instead of water for a month
6. Stub my toe really hard on something
7. Go without sleep for three days
8. Go camping (same as #7)
9. Watch a “Glee” marathon from start to finish
10. Eat a raw hotdog from current-day Leonardo DiCaprio’s crotch

In conclusion, I have to say thank everything worth thanking that the folks at Raja Restaurant are not judgmental asses like yours truly and happy to give a fork and spoon to anyone who finds themselves manually challenged. That’s pretty great of them. Because their food is really wonderful, and it would be a shame to miss out on that incredible curry due to my dumb neuroses. As for eating Thai food like Thai people … well, who am I to say how people eat? It’s nobody’s business but yours.