NYTimes picks best BKK street food

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From NYTimes

 

 

Where to Find Bangkok’s Best Street Food While You Can

Will the city ban its famed street food offerings? It’s unclear. In the meantime, a quest to find the best fishball noodle stands and much more.

 

It was a few minutes after 6 p.m., and Lim Lao Sa, a fishball noodle stand tucked into an alleyway near the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, had just opened. Rain was falling, hard. A series of deftly arranged tarps sheltered patrons sitting on red plastic stools at a handful of tables. Water drizzled off the tarp edges, down the concrete walls and past exposed wiring. Fluorescent bulbs cast harsh shadows. Lim Lao Sa’s owners — a brother and sister who’d inherited the 60-year-old business from their father — bickered vigorously.

 

My friend Win Luanchaison, a real-estate developer and fervent culinary explorer, and I tucked into our bowls. The quenelle-like fishballs were at once springy and creamy, the rice noodles supple, the broth clear and sure of purpose. It was easy to understand why Lim Lao Sa cooked annually for the Thai princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn. “She eats egg noodles served dry,” said Pawita Boriboonchaisiri, the elder sister.

 

In fact, given all of this — the setting, the food, the feeling that Lim Lao Sa could be washed away in an instant, by a bad mood or even worse weather — I decided that Lim Lao Sa was the platonic ideal of street food. And it was precisely why I’d come to Bangkok.

 

Last April, the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority made international headlines when it announced the city of more than 8 million would ban street food vendors — often considered the world’s best — in order to make sidewalks more accessible. The B.M.A. soon walked back its statement, saying street food would be preserved in Chinatown and the Khao San Road backpacker district, but elsewhere it would be eliminated, the vendors relocated from “vital walkways,” as the Tourism Authority of Thailand put it, to “designated zones and nearby markets.” This would happen by year’s end. Eventually. Maybe. Sometime.

 

Continues with pics and video

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/travel/bangkok-street-food-guide-ban.html