Food along Bangkok's sidewalks

Our mission, one we gladly accepted, was to explain the idiosyncrasies of searching out the best food along Bangkok’s sidewalks.

Even after so many years, I still find myself remembering that distant summer evening when my aunt took me to discover the taste of aromatic chestnuts. We made a short excursion from our home in Bang Rak to neon-splashed Chinatown, where the air was perfumed with the delicious smoke of these freshly fried delicacies.

The assortment was as endless as the colors blinking from the fluorescent signs of gold shops that electrified this stretch of the famous street. Amid the insistent cajoling of vendors I was drawn, however, to a young man who was manipulating his cooking utensils with awesome dexterity. First he dumped a handful of reddish-brown chestnuts into a heated pan. Then the shiny balls were churned under the sea of blackened gravel, which I learned later was used to store the heat. A spoonful of sugar was added. The man flipped his spatula with the deftness of an orchestral conductor, and served the roast balls to me in a newspaper wrap.

I registered the fragrance of slightly burnt chestnuts, then the sound of their shells being cracked open. As a child of minimum experience, this snack - excuse the pun - made me go nuts with joy. And, to this day, what joy Bangkok’s sidewalks offer gourmets. They’re always surprising even to the most experienced palates. The chestnut was my introduction to the lifelong activity of street eating; in fact, it’s almost with compulsive dedication that the Thais are always in a quest - which is utterly gratuitous - to proclaim they’ve tasted the best, say, roast chestnuts, or chicken rice, or duck noodle, or kuay chub soup, or kuay tiew lawd, or chicken biryani, or pork satay, or the famous phad Thai noodles, or any item in the vast repertoire of streetwise cooking. It has become a cliché to say that the tastiest food can be found only in the most unassuming sidewalk joints.

But fortunately that statement still rings an unarguable truth: street eateries, particularly those around Bangkok, reflect not only the various influences that characterize the long history of our culinary art, but also the lifestyle of a fun-loving people.