Eastern Thailand Food & Traditional Cuisine

Eastern cooking is central Thai in its foundations — balanced sweet, sour, salty and hot, with jasmine rice — but it has three things that set it apart.

The first is seafood, and specifically crab, squid and shellfish from the Gulf, cooked simply and eaten at the place it was landed.

The second is fruit. This is the orchard region, and the produce does not travel: durian, mangosteen, rambutan, langsat and salak eaten within hours of picking are a different proposition from what reaches a market elsewhere.

The third is a Vietnamese strand at Chanthaburi, where a three-century-old community contributed rice paper, fresh herb rolls and a lighter, less chilli-driven approach that sits alongside the Thai cooking rather than blending into it.

Chanthaburi also gives Thailand one of its staple ingredients: the region’s rice noodles, sen chan, are the ones specified for a properly made pad thai, and they are made here.

Kuay teow sen chan pad pu is the regional dish: Chanthaburi rice noodles — thinner and chewier than the usual sort — stir-fried with crab meat. These are the noodles a good pad thai is supposed to use, and eating them where they are made is the point.

Crab in every form: steamed with a chilli and lime dipping sauce, fried in curry powder and egg, or as pu nim, soft-shell crab deep-fried whole.

Gaeng moo chamuang is Chanthaburi’s own curry — pork belly slow-cooked with the sour leaves of the chamuang tree, which grow only in this region and give the dish a distinctive tartness that nothing else reproduces.

Durian deserves its own line. The eastern varieties, particularly Monthong and Chanee, are what Thailand exports, and buying one at an orchard in May is a regional experience in itself. Hotels ban it for the smell, which is not an exaggeration.

Also: grilled squid along the Rayong seafront, nam prik kapi with shrimp paste and raw vegetables, and Vietnamese herb rolls in Chanthaburi.

Seafood is bought from the boats. The stilt village at Bang Bao on Ko Chang, and the piers at Rayong and Trat, sell the catch straight off the ice, and the restaurants built over the water cook it to order — agree a price per kilo before pointing.

Fruit markets are the regional institution from April to June. Roadside stalls in Chanthaburi and Rayong sell by variety and by tree, and the fruit festivals in both provinces are eating events rather than parades.

Chanthaburi’s riverside quarter has a night market and a strip of old shophouse restaurants serving the Vietnamese-influenced local food, and is one of the more rewarding places to eat in the region.

Night markets in Trat, Rayong and the island towns follow the standard Thai pattern — grilled meat, noodle stalls, som tam pounded to order.

On the islands, prices are higher and quality varies; the places locals eat are usually inland from the beach road rather than on it.

The east is not wine country — the climate is far too wet and humid, and Thailand’s vineyards are all inland and further north or west. What the region produces instead is fruit wine, a genuine local industry built on the orchards.

Mangosteen, rambutan, lychee, pineapple and even durian are fermented commercially around Chanthaburi and Rayong, sold at the fruit festivals and at roadside stalls. They are sweet, low in alcohol and closer to a dessert wine than a table wine, and they are worth trying as a regional product rather than judged against grape wine.

The other eastern drink is toddy and the various palm-sugar preparations, and the ubiquitous Thai beers.

Note that alcohol sales are restricted by law to roughly 11am to 2pm and 5pm to midnight, and banned entirely on major Buddhist holidays — which catches out anyone buying for an island trip.

Imported wine carries heavy duty and is expensive everywhere in Thailand.