{"id":2548,"date":"2025-11-22T21:38:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T05:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/?p=2548"},"modified":"2025-12-16T17:14:36","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T01:14:36","slug":"thailand-day-3-bangkok-food-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/?p=2548","title":{"rendered":"Thailand, Day 3: Bangkok – Food Tour!"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK, right up front, if you are planning a trip to Bangkok, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 Baht, do not EVER play Monopoly (it’s a TERRIBLE game, seriously. In this dissertation, I shall…). Just immediately go to Chili Paste tours<\/a> and book their “Old Bangkok Food and Culture Walk.”<\/p>\n

I would say just trust me, but we can do better than that.\u00a0 Buckle up. But not literally, because tuktuks don’t have seatbelts.<\/p>\n

Chin, our guide, picked us up from our hotel promptly at 9 AM. We had a tuktuk driver with us for the entire day, who would go off and park when we set out on foot, and then rejoin us when it was time to shuttle to another part of the city. For the record, Bangkok traffic is terrifying<\/em>, especially in a tiny vehicle with no doors or windows. But also kinda thrilling.<\/p>\n

We started the day by walking down a narrow alley to get to a different, narrower alley to discover a home with a small cart outside the door and about six people gathered around inside making dim sum. Or rather just one kind of dim sum – pork shu mai.\u00a0 Apparently, they make thousands of these things every day, and then granddad goes out and sells them until they are gone. Which doesn’t take long, because they are amazing.<\/p>\n

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This was off to a hell of a start. What next? Coffee? Sure, I love coffee. Leigh, on the other hand, opted for an iced tea, which turned out to be a Thai iced tea that came in a bag.<\/p>\n

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How about visiting a shop where they make Chinese sausage?<\/p>\n

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\nWe got to taste the sausage, as well as go inside and watch some of the sausage being made, too. I don’t know what everyone complains about – it was fine.<\/p>\n

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Oh look – a big vat of chicken feet!
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Time for some flaky pastries? Sure!
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\nOr perhaps some noodle wonton soup, with sausage and crabmeat!
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Oh look – deep fried sprats and chicken skin – here, take a bag of each!\"\"<\/p>\n

If this post seems a little short on words and description it’s because I’m trying to convey the sheer overwhelming PACE of this tour. At this point, we were still entirely<\/em> on foot from our starting point.<\/p>\n

It was becoming clear that while Chin definitely had some fixed stops she did every tour, there was also a GREAT deal of improvisation going on. (“ADHD” would possibly not also be an inapt description, but in the best and most delicious possible way.) We’d be walking down the street, or through a market, and she’d stop and go “Oh hey!\u00a0 Look at this – this is delicious, you should try it!” And suddenly, we were.<\/p>\n

We’ve been on food tours before (for example, in Prague<\/a>) where there were a number of carefully curated stops, and each shop had been alerted to expect us and had a specific sample platter ready to go. And don’t get me wrong – those are great! But this was NOT that. While many of the merchants knew Chin, not all of them appeared to, and there’s no way the random careening from food to food was an entirely preplanned itinerary.<\/p>\n

It was amazing. It also meant that as the day went on, we slowly accumulated a bag full of snacks we had no hope of eating in our one remaining day in Bangkok with access to a refrigerator.<\/p>\n

Also – just to be clear. All of the pictures (and eating) so far took place in under an hour.<\/em><\/p>\n

At this point, we boarded the tuktuk and made our way to a heavily Vietnamese area north of the palace where it was time for lunch. Well, I mean, we had to have a snack first to get ready.<\/p>\n

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Sweetened beef floss. Delicious. Everything was delicious. But now it was time for lunch.<\/p>\n

Which turned out to be a whole-ass Vietnamese FEAST.<\/p>\n

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\nAt this point we could have been done with the tour, and it would already have been an amazing day. But this is a day-long<\/em> tour. We were only half finished. However, perhaps bowing to biological necessity, Chin took us to a nearby monastery complex for a bit of the “culture” part of the food and culture tour.<\/p>\n

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\nInterestingly, the murals in this particular temple were done in a much more Western style than was typical at many of the places we visited. We also wandered through the lovely peaceful grounds of the adjacent residential complex, the relaxing calm broken only by the shrieks from the school playground across the street and the constant roar of construction equipment and motorcycle engines.<\/p>\n

Leigh had asked if Chin knew of anyone making or selling silver jewelry, so at this point we made a stop at a charming little shop where she bought a few pairs of earrings. (Note from Leigh: I was not intending for this to become part of the food tour — I just thought she might provide a recommendation that we could follow up on later! At this point, though, we were happy to have the break from eating.)<\/p>\n

But enough of this calm. Back to the food!<\/p>\n

How about some daifuku?<\/p>\n

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A nice bowl of offal soup?<\/p>\n

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\nHow about some pineapple on a stick? (And by “some”, I mean “what appeared to be an entire damn pineapple chopped up and thrust into our hands.)<\/p>\n

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\nSome sort of sausage wrapped in a leaf with palm sugar? Why not?
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\nAt this point we were wandering around a market area, and we took a quick break to visit the Buddhist shrine inside\u00a0<\/em>the market. (After being handed a coconut cake for later, of course.)<\/p>\n

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\nWe didn’t get any great pictures of the shrine itself, but this is the hallway underneath.<\/p>\n

Stop!<\/p>\n

Smoothie time!<\/p>\n

We were first handed a tiny green fruit to try.<\/p>\n

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This is a bilimibi fruit. It can be eaten out of hand, and is sour and delicious by itself. But, and hear me out, what if you blended it with fingerroot (sort of like ginger but different), passion fruit, pineapple, and roselle?<\/p>\n

You get literally the best smoothie I have ever had in my life, that’s what.<\/p>\n

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Holy crap.\u00a0 I will have DREAMS about this smoothie.
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\nWe continued to drink this as we were ushered around the corner to a fruit stand where we were issued not one, but TWO coconuts. You know, so we could compare them.<\/p>\n

Additionally, it was one old coconut and one young coconut, so we were prepared to perform any sort of coconut exorcism that might end up being required.<\/p>\n

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Back in the tuktuk, and off to the south side of town to visit a small shopping mall. This served a number of purposes – it let Leigh look around a few more jewelry shops (although the private one earlier was definitely more interesting), it let us spend a little time in the AC, and it gave us another small break from stuffing ourselves. We still wandered around and LOOKED at food, however, and the “oh look at this!” “oh look at this” “oh look at this!” was still on full display.<\/p>\n

But soon enough, it was time to resume eating!<\/p>\n

How about a squid on a stick?<\/p>\n

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\nChoux pastry swan?
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\nBanana roti? (We somehow managed to have BOTH of us forget to take a picture of this one, but trust me, it was also delicious. EVERYTHING was delicious.)<\/p>\n

Flower market?<\/p>\n

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\nWait – flower market? You can’t eat that.<\/p>\n

It was still fascinating, however – all of the floral offerings we had observed being presented at the various temples we had wandered through in the previous two days were clearly being prepared here or somewhere like it.<\/p>\n

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\nThe day was getting late, but we still had a few more stops. The tuktuk made its way to a Michelin recognized store famous for its mango sticky rice. We were handed a portion of that for later, but also an entire mango. “These are special mangos – they don’t normally sell them separately.”<\/p>\n

So we ate a mango. It was a lifetime top three mango, for sure. Pity we also forgot to photograph it. We were getting tired<\/em> at this point. One last stop in store, however.<\/p>\n

We returned to our starting point in Chinatown, and made our way to…<\/p>\n

…oh, look! Peking Duck! You should have some of this…<\/p>\n

…made our way to a tea shop that we had passed earlier, but that hadn’t been open at the time. We sat down to a fairly intense tea tasting, with a complicated, multi-step process of washing, pouring, rinsing, brewing, and pouring again, for each of the five or so teas we sampled.<\/p>\n

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\nAnd with that, the food tour came to its conclusion at 5 pm. What an amazing day.<\/p>\n

Oh, and here’s the haul of what we had in the bag by the end of it:<\/p>\n

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More or less clockwise from upper left, a bag of pineapple oolong loose leaf tea, some crunchy fried fish, chicken skin, beef floss, some crispy crepes (I know<\/em> we picked those up at some point, but damned if I remember when, even though we’d clearly already eaten half of them [Note from Leigh: I’m pretty sure these were handed to us while we were at the flower market]), one of the little green bilimbi fruits, a coconut cake, some sausage, two pastry swans, a box of Peking duck wraps, and a portion of Michelin-recommended mango sticky rice.<\/p>\n

Whew. That list would make the world’s weirdest rendition of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”<\/p>\n

What else to do after a day like that but go out for cocktails?<\/p>\n

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Holy hell, what a day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK, right up front, if you are planning a trip to Bangkok, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 Baht, do not EVER play Monopoly (it’s a TERRIBLE game, seriously. In this dissertation, I shall…). Just immediately go to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2552,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-thailand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2548"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2676,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2548\/revisions\/2676"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}