Street Food in Bangkok
It’s a familiar scene across Asia: a small cart bright with fluorescent light and flanked by rickety fold-up tables and plastic stools. Simple, inexpensive dishes are served on brightly-coloured melamine plates.
If it’s in a Taipei back alley, it could be beef noodle soup; in a Hong Kong dai pai dong, French toast with a glass of milk tea. In this particular case, it was pad thai on an uneven sidewalk in Bangkok, inches from the roaring traffic of Asoke Road.
I placed my order (which wasn’t hard — most stalls only specialize in a few dishes) and sat down on a bright blue stool at a table with bottles of fish sauce, vinegar and chili. A few minutes later, the cook handed me the pad thai. It struck a nice balance between the full-mouthed savouriness of the fish sauce and dried shrimp and the tang of lime and tamarind. All told, it was probably one of the better attempts at the dish I’ve had. I paid when I left: 30 baht, just under one Canadian dollar.
In North America and Europe, with only some exceptions, street food is something you grab on the go, eating as you walk or taking it to a nearby bench to eat. That’s true even for dishes that are much more substantial than a simple hot dog or crêpe; in New York, just after getting off the Staten Island Ferry, I paid $5 for a styrofoam container of delicious jerk chicken, but I had to wander a few blocks to Bowling Green to find a place to eat it.
In Asia, by contrast, street vendors are more like itinerant restaurants, roaming around the city, briefly occupying a parcel of sidewalk before moving on after a few hours. It’s just as quick and informal as street food anywhere in the world, but having tables and chairs changes the atmosphere considerably.
Bangkok’s street vendors often return to the same general area every night, and people seek them out and sit with friends, eating and drinking beer bought at a nearby convenience store. It turns even the most desolate stretch of sidewalk into a convivial outdoor café.
Tags: Bangkok, Hawkers, New York, Street Food, Street Vendors, Streetlife
Christopher Szabla says:
I wonder if this has something to do with the relative provision of public space, which seems to be rare(r) in developing countries, and somewhat better policed against impromptu picnickers when it does. You definitely have to walk much farther in Cairo or Shanghai to find a publicly available park, stoop, or bench than New York (but there are probably fewer regulations concerning where one can put a table and chairs on the sidewalk or street).
Of course, Americans (particularly New Yorkers) also tend to be overscheduled workaholics. A lot of street food here gets eaten at desks or over meetings, if not consumed while walking down the sidewalk (a practice that’s taboo in some other countries).
Now if I could only figure out where one eats take-out in Japan, where convenience stores are all busy preparing meals, but provide nowhere to eat them, and where neat businessmen scowl at anyone eating or drinking in parks or the street…
February 20th, 2010 at 7:13 pm