Bangkok’s swapping street food for fine dining, but will the tourists bite?
- As Thais get a taste for fine dining, the future looks unappetising for the street vendors who help sell the city to visitors
Author and Thai food expert Leela Punyaratabandhu has a bone to pick with the way you think about Thai food. “When people think of Thai, they often think of something cheap. It’s always about street food,” she says.
“There’s a lot more to Thailand and Thai cuisine than what you can see on the street. I have a problem with thinking that street food is the best food Bangkok has to offer.”
Long feted as a street food paradise, the Thai capital is undergoing a culinary evolution amid an explosion in sit-down eateries, ranging from Michelin-starred restaurants to homestyle shophouses, and a government crackdown on street hawkers.
During the last five years, Thailand’s restaurant market has grown by about US$500 million annually, according to Euromonitor International. Casual full-service restaurants, which captured only 2 per cent of the market in 2010, accounted for a third of that growth. The Michelin Guide to Bangkok 2019 highlights no fewer than 27 restaurants, all of which qualify as fine dining on the basis of price if not presentation, save for a single shophouse – described as the only “street food eatery” to receive a star. The Guide, which for more than 100 years has claimed to designate the world’s best restaurants, only began recognising restaurants in Asia in the past decade. Half of the picks on this year’s Bangkok list serve Thai food.
The city of 8.2 million people has at the same time become a hotbed of culinary experimentation, from “progressive Indian” at Gaggan – lauded as one of the best restaurants in the world – to excavations of curries past from the palace archives served at Paste, whose chef-owner Bee Satongun was last year awarded the title of best female chef in Asia by William Reed, publisher of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants.
“Bangkok is at this transformative stage right now, where New York or London was 20 years ago,” says Garima Arora, who became the first Indian woman to head a Michelin-starred restaurant with this year’s award for her modern eclectic restaurant Gaa.