An auspicious place to start is Phra Nakorn, on of the oldest areas of the city, where preservation orders and building restrictions ensure the 21st century has barely murmured. The narrow streets wave around some of Bangkok’s finest temples, and Chinese-style shop houses that sell Buddha images, candles and incense, all wrapped in bridge orange cellophane to match the monks’ robes.
Many adjacent outlets are simple raan aharn feeding the armies of civil servants from nearby government offices. Most names and menus are in Thai script, and you may need to follow your nose and point, but just off Tanao Road, which runs from the Flower Market to Ratchadamnoen Klang, close to Democracy Monument, there’s a famous cafe called Chote Chitr with its name also printed in English.
It opened 90 years ago, during the reign of King Rama VI, when young men still climbed the nearby Giant Swing to catch pouches of money in their teeth, a New Year ritual long banned because it caused so many deaths.
The first owner, Khun Chote, a doctor of traditional Thai medicine, sold his list of remedies from the premises. His wife had worked in one of the royal kitchens, and after they married she began selling lunchtime snacks alongside Khun Chote’s medicines, which cured everything from swollen feet to impotence.
The restaurant still serves both to this day, all to the original recipes, in a location that has changed little an unassuming shop house with a mere six tables, which makes getting a lunch- time seat very difficult.
Chote Chitr’s richly herbed dishes include an acclaimed gaeng leang, listed on the menu as old-fashioned soup”. Stuffed with vegetables and a handful of shrimp, it boasts sour and peppery-hot flavors that are underscored with the distinctive Thai saltiness of fish sauce, or nam plaa. There’s also a sensational dark, pungent dressing in the wing bean and banana flower salads that derives much of its depth from home-made phrik pao, in which the flavors sweet, smoked, garlic dance through the mouth, like the finish of a fine wine.
Phrik pao is one of the renowned naam phrik relishes that are at the origins of Thai food. If you wanted to be completely authentic, you’d eat this stuff on its own with rice, as agricultural workers did 2,000 years ago.