A Little About Street Food — Hutong Provisions

When I first came to Thailand in 2009, I had a picture in my head of street food. I imagined hawkers with carts making food fresh to order with small manageable menus. I imagined them waking up, going to the wet markets to get their raw products, doing all of their prep at home, coming out with all of their gear and their mise en place for their service period, whether it be breakfast, lunch or dinner, going home, going to sleep, and doing it all again the next day. In some ways this is a very true picture of these peoples’ lives. However, it’s not all quite cooking on the spot.

This is where I get my braised pork leg on rice

So, to start off with, there are the ones that cook their one or two different things on the street onto order or as close to order as possible. I count most of the people with fire on their carts or stands in this category. As stated before, they show up with their mise en place and rock out every dish in order as they come in, whether it be a papaya salad, a grilled or fried skewer, or a rice plate.

Some of these places operate out of a storefront. The place I get my pad kra pao from actually has a seating area inside, but the kitchen is out front. This is actually quite common here in thailand, having the kitchen up front. It makes it easy for them to service the walk up takeout business as well as the people who are dining in by essentially eliminating the servers. The cooks take the orders and they deliver the food. Payment is made on the way out. With your kitchen up front, it also makes ventilation easier, and also lets the great smells that the cooks produce to waft out onto the street. That’s actually how I found my pad kra pao place. One day, as I walked down the street, a huge burst of chili peppers invaded my nasal passages, bringing me to tears… in a good way. I knew that I had to go in to get something to eat.

My braised pork leg on rice vendor is perched outside of their dine in space as well. It made it easy for them to close off their dining room through the coronavirus lockdown. They operated as they normally would serving takeout out front of their space of the one thing that they cooked, and simply closed the door to the inside.

There are also straight up cart vendors out on the street making their dishes to order. My papaya salad vendor is one of them. She has a lot of her mise en place set up, different bowls for different types of salad, whether it be corn and green mango, papaya, salted crab, glass noodle, or any other number of major ingredients. She tends to have a line waiting for her to bang through. It’s one of the drawbacks to being one of the a la minute cooks out on the street. She doesn’t sandbag and make things ahead. At least she shreds her papaya ahead of time. There are a few vendors I have seen who will shred papaya to order and though it doesn’t take long, when your line is running four or five people deep, every second counts.

I think Thai street food is one of those examples that goes both ways. The food can be extremely easy and fast, and at the same time can take so long for something that is so easy and fast.

This is where I buy my grilled fish from

The next kind of street food you find, I tend to call “grocery store buffet.” On every street food street, you will find vendors with trays of eight to twelve different dishes, or even sometimes as many as twenty dishes. You walk up, point at what you want, and they will bag it so you can take it away. Unlike buffets, there are no steam tables. There is very little heat maintained. I have witnessed some of these vendors setting up right at the beginning of a mealtime period with a progression of dishes steaming hot at 4:30/5:00.

The problem is that by 6:00, the dishes are lukewarm at best. That really sucks, because like a geriatric man, I like my food piping hot. So whenever I want a curry or a dish from one of these vendors, I inevitably have to put it in the microwave to bring it to a palatable temperature. I see wok fried clams that look absolutely delicious every day, but I haven’t gotten them yet, because they’re just not going to be the right temperature, or the texture will be ruined by being nuked.

I feel like this is the type of street food that would most likely skeeve out the majority of Americans as it is just left out at room temperature for who knows how long as far as they’re concerned. I once flipped through a case study on Thai street food and why there is relatively low occurrences of food borne illnesses. It’s that the vendors tend to only be out for just under the amount of time that it would take for food borne bacteria to take hold in the temperature danger zone. When I read this fact, it caught me completely by surprise, but seeing some of these vendors day in and day out, watching them operate, for the most part, it’s true.

Besides these “grocery store buffets,” there are also a number of carts that will grill different sausages, meats, fish, and vegetables. Some will absolutely grill to order, but a lot of them will grill off a bunch of skewers and set them out for people to pick through. Sometimes they will let you throw the skewers back on the grill. Other times, they’ll just bag up the lukewarm skewers to enjoy at that temperature. Make no mistake… these skewers are delicious at any temperature. It makes sense though. Being a guy who had skewers on his menu for years, let me tell you. They take a lot longer to cook than you would think. And when it comes to whole salt grilled fish, either you had better be ready to wait for a good long time, or he had better have a bunch of those suckers sandbagged.

I think that could be the beauty of all of this type of street food. You have what you have. When you sell out, you’ve made the money that you expected to make for the day. There’s no more that can be done. If you only fried up the parts of three dozen chickens, that’s all you have to sell. They’re fried and customers don’t have to wait. When you’re out on the street, as a cook, you don’t have to worry about the proper pacing of a meal. The customers don’t care about being rushed. In fact, they want to spend as little time with the vendor as the vendor wants to spend with them. It’s a “shut up and take my money/shut up and give me your money” type of transaction. I’m sure that there are plenty of people who have become friends with their vendors, who, unlike me, have the language skills to be cordial and caring, but the majority of the interactions that I see are people who are pointing, grabbing, paying, and walking.

The last type of food you will find hanging out with the street food is the raw stuff. For those of you who have not been to Thailand, just like in America, they have grocery stores. These grocery stores have aisles, just like the ones in America, and sell products equivalent to the products that you would see in grocery stores in America, but with more of an Asian flavor behind it. It’s not like we’re out in the deep country. However, a lot of places in Asia have other outlets to get raw cooking supplies. Some of them are large wet markets, which are getting a bad rap on the world stage these days, and could be fixed with just a little bit of structural improvements. However, there are also a lot of local small vendors that hang out on street food streets.

These vendors sell everything from fresh chickens, fish, and even frogs to vegetables to cooking oil and fish sauce. The ones that I have seen have done a pretty good job keeping their proteins iced down. I have seen fruit vendors spraying their fruit with cold water, and vegetable vendors putting up umbrellas to keep their greens from wilting. There is actually one guy who sells beautiful organic head lettuce on the street.

I think that if I had a wok, a pan, or a pot in my condo here, I would definitely be buying at least my produce at these vendors. Their prices are significantly lower than the ones at the grocery stores here. And honestly, the Chinese broccoli, Yu Choi, and bok Choi at these carts are usually absolutely gorgeous. You can smell the greens from five feet away.

Speaking of the fresh produce that I see on the street, I really wish I had someone here with me who was bilingual, or who could explain to me what some of the things are. There are several fruits and greens that I have no clue what they are or how to eat them. Prior to COVID, I was really looking forward to my buddy Jitti to move back to Bangkok. I hoped that I could just point to different produce items and he could tell me what it’s called, what it tastes like, and how to best use it. I guess that will have to wait for another trip to Thailand, since he’s stuck in the United States.

So that’s my little look into what street food is like here near my condo in Bangkok. I have just over two weeks before I’m supposed to fly back to Boston, so I’m still inhaling as much local fresh fruit as I can. They’re planning on opening up more of Bangkok starting tomorrow, so I might go into the city center to find some food later in the week. There is a rumor that the New Rod Fai Train Market will open up next weekend, though I am still really skeptical of going to places that may have a higher density of people. I opted out of going to the Chatuchak Weekend Market last weekend, and I don’t think I will go this weekend either. I’ll think about it next weekend, but I don’t know what I’ll do. Even if I do decide to check it out, I think that if there are too many people, I’ll just go back to hiding in my condo. That’s the theme of this trip to Thailand. Hiding in my condo binging tv shows. Well, I had better get back to that.