Now I know that I’ve written about my travels to Thailand in the past but once again, I’ve just got back from an oh-too-short, urgently needed three-day break. Thailand has to be my place of choice in Asia for a quick trip for many reasons, including the really cheap rates that you can travel for, the great accommodation and hospitality, the Thai people and, of course, the food that is available.

I don’t think I’m out of place in saying that most Thai people eat out everyday. Firstly, you can get fantastic street food anywhere in Thailand, which is always easily affordable, tasty, clean and fresh, even if it’s just a quick bowl of noodles or a green curry and rice for instance. The variety of foods that are available, (unless you are in the outback somewhere) is just amazing. Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Italian, French, Indian, North African… You name it, you’ll find it in Bangkok.

When it comes to Thai food, I don’t think you can beat the food that are available on the streets. Feel free to eat Thai food in swanky restaurants but it will never be better than the street stuff. In restaurants, you’ll only get restaurant food. The food on the streets seems to be much more like the real thing. There is something more honest about it somehow, and there are always plenty of interesting things to try if you are open-minded enough, like various offal items and other interesting dishes cooked using local ingredients (vegetables, roots, herbs, spices, grubs).

I’m one of those people willing to give anything a go. This time I tried sea slug, Chinese-style braised chicken’s feet and, for the first time, those delightfully crunchy, salty, crispy fried scorpions that you find being pulled around on carts with other delicacies such as grasshoppers, beetles, cockroaches and tree grubs (none of them anywhere near as bad as you think they are going to be). They taste just the same as any fried snack, really.

The two other food musts for me on a visit to Bangkok have to be one good lunch of dim sum and a good dose of sushi. We stayed at the Ambassador Hotel, as we usually do, just off Sukhumvit. They have a restaurant on the first floor that serves a dim sum lunch from a trolley. You start with a choice of soup, then a side dish of fried rice or noodles and then a never-ending supply of 36 varieties of dim sum, Chinese tea and a dessert — all for about Rs 700 for two. Dim sums have to be some of the best things I can imagine. Tiny little packages of pork, prawn, crab, sea scallop, a whole world of wondrous delights that always bring back memories of when I was in my early 20s, working in Manchester. A few friends and I would meet at a restaurant called the Yang Sing in China Town for dim sum lunch on Saturdays, then we’d all have to go back to work in the evening — not particularly pleasant after a bottle of sake I may add, but fantastic all the same.

And then there’s sushi and sashimi. Again, another favourite. And if there is no other reason to go to Thailand, it’s worth a trip just for that.

The writer has worked in London, The Park Hotels chain across India and is responsible for the recent revamp of Flury’s in Calcutta.

 

FOODFETISH

Over the past few years I have become more and more interested in the Japanese approach to life — clean, simple and minimal. The food culture is so fascinatingly healthy. Obviously, the fresher the ingredients, the better for everyone. I remember going to Rungis, a large wholesale market in Paris many years ago and meeting a small Japanese man who was checking the quality of tuna for export to Japan. A fascinating job, in which he’d push something that looked like a long pineapple corer into the flesh.
When he pulled it out, he would get a long cylindrical piece of fish that he would check for bruising and stress marks. If the fish was good, it would be packed on ice and within
24 hours, someone in Japan would be eating it as sushi. My personal favourites when it comes to sushi or sashimi have to be mackerel, sea scallop and tuna. Sushi is kind of like sticky rice rolls, wrapped in dried seaweed (nori) with slices of raw fish and shellfish. Sashimi is only the slithers of fish or shellfish. Both are simply dipped in a little light Kikoman soy with a small nib of wasabi and a shaving of pickled ginger. What could be cleaner or healthier to eat? Freshness at its epitome.