Thai Seafood

If you like seafood, you’re in luck. Thai cooking is the most seafood intensive of any cuisine except perhaps Japanese. In general, Thai dishes and meals are built more around fish and shellfish than poultry and meat.

The roots of Thai culture, after all, are in water not land: the first to arrive in what is now Thailand settled along its rivers. Today, you could eat only seafood meals here and hard l get bored. Seafood is the basis of Thai dishes, including curries, soups, sauces, rice, noodles, appetizers and salads.

Thai restaurateurs have turned seafood into a form of ready-made advertising. Restaurants along beaches and sidewalks have enormous stainless-steel trays to display the catch fresh flounders, sea bass, grouper, tiger shrimp, lobsters, crabs, clams and oysters. A nice fish is pleasing to the eye, keeping cool on a glistening bed of ice.

Any Thai restaurant includes seafood on its menu, but many specialize. Around Bangkok dozens are found along main thoroughfares such as Sukhumvit, Silom and Rama IV. In many, simply select the fish yourself from a tank, and pay by weight. Fancy seafood meals of this sort have long been considered compulsory in Thailand, and now the rest of us are, well, catching on