|
Picture this: it’ s 2011 and I’ ve just published my first street food guide, Bangkok’ s Top 50 Street Food Stalls. The excellence of Jay Fai’ s cooking was one of the things that inspired the book in the first place. Proud of my accomplishment and eager to present it to my muse, I give Jay Fai( real name Supinya Junsuta) her very own copy. I soon discover, to my horror, that she’ s not so pleased to be in this book.
“ I’ m in the same book as them?” she asks, waving a dismissive hand at the pad thai shop next door.
She might have a point— what she cooks is a different proposition to what’ s on offer at the noodle shop down the road( although both are famous). But all I can think about is that she won’ t let me eat at her shophouse anymore. And that thought gives me a chill that goes right into my bones.
One of the servers behind her whispers to me,“ You should go.” So I do, not asking any questions, unsure if I’ ll ever have Jay Fai’ s drunken noodles again. Luckily, the next time I see her, she’ s happy and serene,
|
even finding the time to take a break to school me on how to make tom yum soup.
A lot has changed since 2011. The stall now has a Michelin star, and people wait as long as four hours for the honor of taking a seat in her open-air, green-tiled dining room. Street food is a bona fide global phenomenon, a buzzword for savvy restaurateurs and shorthand for a person who’ s cool and adventurous— a la Mark Wiens. Under the name‘ Marktiplier,’ he first began his YouTube career in 2012, the same year he published his e-book, The Eating Thai Food Guide. Today, Mark has more than 11 million subscribers on his main YouTube account( including my mom) and can be seen on TV screens all over the world. But when he first came to Thailand, he was struck by the very same things that moved me about street food: the feeling of real lives unfolding over cold mugs of beers and steaming bowls of noodles, people laughing on plastic stools as traffic whizzed by. It felt like a shortcut to diving into Thai culture.
|
Clockwise from above: A street food stall in the busy area of Silom; the uniquely shaped King Power Mahanakhon building dominating the skyline Previous pages: Locals and tourists eating and drinking at the wide selection of food stalls in Chinatown |
images: getty |
|||
50 • pos t c a rds |