Central Thailand Food & Traditional Cuisine

Central Thai cooking is the version that travelled. When a restaurant anywhere in the world serves green curry, tom yum and pad thai, it is cooking from this plain.

The defining principle is balance — sweet, sour, salty, hot and often bitter adjusted within a single dish and across a meal. Fish sauce provides the salt, palm sugar the sweet, lime and tamarind the sour, and fresh chilli the heat. Coconut milk is used far more here than in the north or north-east.

The staple is jasmine rice, long-grain and fragrant, eaten with a spoon and fork rather than chopsticks, which are reserved for noodles.

Two outside influences run deep. Chinese cooking gave the region its noodles, its woks and its stir-frying, and Thai-Chinese families run much of the food trade. Portuguese traders at Ayutthaya introduced the chilli itself in the sixteenth century, along with the egg-yolk-and-sugar sweets still sold today.

Meals are shared, dishes arrive as they are ready, and rice anchors everything.

Tom yum goong is the region’s emblem: a clear, fiercely hot and sour prawn soup built on lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime leaf, lime juice and chilli, sometimes enriched with evaporated milk.

Gaeng khiao wan, green curry, takes its colour from fresh green chillies pounded into the paste, cooked out in coconut cream with Thai basil and pea aubergines. Massaman is its opposite — mild, Persian-influenced, with cardamom, cinnamon and potato.

Pad thai, rice noodles fried with tamarind, fish sauce, egg, tofu and dried shrimp, was promoted nationally in the 1940s as a patriotic dish and is now inseparable from the country.

Som tam, green papaya pounded in a mortar with lime, chilli, dried shrimp and palm sugar, came from the north-east and has been thoroughly adopted here.

Also: khao man gai, the Hainanese chicken rice of the Chinese quarter; gaeng som, a sour orange curry; pla neung manao, steamed fish with lime and garlic; and mango with sticky rice in the hot season, which is the point of April.

Bangkok eats in the street, and the street is the restaurant. Stalls specialise absolutely — one noodle soup, one grill, one dessert, cooked by the same family for decades — and the queue is the only review that matters.

Yaowarat, the main road of the Chinese quarter, is the single best eating street in the country after dark: seafood grills, bird’s nest, oyster omelettes and crowds until well past midnight.

Morning markets across the plain sell curries by the bag from dawn, which is how most households eat. Or Tor Kor in Bangkok is the country’s best produce market.

Floating markets are the regional speciality, a survival of the canal economy. Amphawa and Tha Kha are working weekend markets used by Thais; Damnoen Saduak is heavily staged. The Maeklong railway market, which packs up as a train passes through it several times a day, is genuinely a functioning market.

Street food has come under periodic pressure from city clearance programmes, which is worth knowing when you find a stall still there.

Thailand has a small but serious new-latitude wine industry, and its centre is in this region — the hills west and south-west of Bangkok, and the Khao Yai area on the region’s eastern edge.

Khao Yai, at around 350 to 550 metres, is the best-known appellation in the country, with several estates open for tasting, restaurants and accommodation, and a harvest in February. Syrah, Chenin Blanc, Viognier and the Italian Dolcetto do reasonably here; the wines are light, food-friendly and improving quickly.

West of Bangkok toward Hua Hin, vineyards planted on former elephant land have become a small tourism draw in their own right.

The older drinking culture is beer and spirits: Singha and Chang, the cane spirit sold as Thai rum, and the rice liquor lao khao.

Note that alcohol sales are restricted by law to roughly 11am to 2pm and 5pm to midnight, and are banned outright on major Buddhist holidays — a rule that catches visitors out in supermarkets.