Last updated: 1 July, 2024 @ 16:16
Bangkok is a swirling, sweltering, chaotic mass of people, noise and colour. Discover why for seafood lovers there’s no destination quite like it.
The humidity and heat of late March intensifies by the day ahead of April’s peak temperatures.
The city is chaotically busy and intensely noisy as Tuk-Tuks pass, popping and rattling as they go, whilst young moped riders helter-skelter their way through the incessant traffic with skill – or luck.
However, fishfaceseafoodblog wasn’t in town for a traffic survey. We were in Bangkok for the food, the street food, the seafood street food – the dishes so many had told us to avoid before embarking on our travels (it’s unhygienic, you’ll catch something, etc…)
Devilishly dark, hot chilli sauce
Food is everywhere in Bangkok. Street vendors appear on every corner, their ‘seen-better-days’ wheel-along stalls and grills selling everything from whole coconuts to handmade chicken skewers dipped in a devilishly dark, hot chilli sauce.
From these stalls real treats can be discovered – this is food made with love, skill and simple, fresh ingredients.
However, for seafood lovers, there’s one district in Bangkok that is an unmissable destination: Chinatown
Chinatown’s seafood extravaganza
The place is insane. Vibrant and pulsating, if there were a rebellious group of anti-Michelin-star-style-restaurant renegades it would be headquartered in one of the dark alleyways in this incredible, captivating part of the city.
Forget your flamboyant liquid nitrogen dining experiences, Bangkok’s Chinatown offers something more, something that cannot be easily recreated – and that is the true meaning, and enjoyment, of eating.
It feels like something of a forgotten pleasure to watch fantastic ingredients cooked before your very eyes with effortless skill, prepared and presented to you in a little tub or on a wooden skewer.
This is authentic dining – it’s harsh, it’s noisy, it’s shoulder-to-shoulder busy – but it’s also simply wonderful.
Squid sizzles
At every turn, round every corner, down every narrow back alley you’ll find someone tossing a wok or something bubbling away in simmering oil or over hot coals.
There’s meat, fruit, noodles, sweet treats, pancakes, spring rolls, smoothies, shakes, insects on sticks – and of course, plentiful amounts of seafood.
Squid of all sizes sizzles on open-air grills, expertly cooked to order – some presented with squid eggs, some without.
Sliced and served in a little bowls, the accompanying chilli sauce is so formidable that you’ll appreciate the few stalks of cooling coriander topping the dish as if it’s a herb sent from Boreas himself.
Oversized lollipops of huge prawns, lightly battered and skewered are so beautifully cooked that you’re unlikely to ever taste a prawn so moist, so meaty, so perfect again.
Misbehaving cat
But that’s not all. Walk a little further and there’s stalls offering cuttlefish, jellyfish, blue swimming crab, whelks, spotted grouper, barramundi, farmed tilapia and Asian seabass, huge ‘rainbow’ lobsters – and much, much more.
Some stalls offer seating, where you can grab a cooling Chang or five, other vendors will hurry you along if you linger too long – obstructing potential new custom. “Go, go,” we were told, shooed away like a misbehaving cat.
Small clams in a sweet lemon sauce
Away from the chaos of the street food vendors and their enthusiastic customers small, brightly-lit restaurants offer a vast range of seafood dishes.
These are places of relative calm in amongst the enjoyable disorder of the streets.
One such venue, The Seafood Café and Restaurant, a three-tiered, homely kind a place, boasted a voluminous menu offering everything from delicate clams in a sweet lemon sauce and squid served just about every kind of way, to grilled prawns and lobsters and pickled crab eggs.
The temptation is to arrive early, embed yourself in a little corner and work your way through the menu (and several ice-cold Changs).
Bangkok’s Chinatown – a real and rare treat
Bangkok’s Chinatown is an education, a revelation, a refreshing dose of how simplicity, passion and fresh ingredients are all that’s really needed for a genuine eating experience.
And if you’re a seafood lover, you’re in for a real and rare treat.