Siam Exchange BTS Station

If you’re on holidays in Bangkok or other parts of Thailand, you must keep reading and follow my tips to these delicious hawker foods. There is not particular area that I would recommending in getting to these eats. Bangkok has massive food culture and you could find a lot of hawker food scattered out all over the place. If there’s one place that is easy to access and has most of my favourite options, I would refer you to the Siam area.

This area is right at the door step of BTS stop Siam - BTS is an appreciation of something long that no one really knows, but it’s the fancy term for our Sky Train! Important: you should only go there in the evening time, maybe from 6:00pm onwards since that’s about the time all the vendors come out and offer their products. The vendors in this sense refers to those selling clothes, fashion accessories, electronics (phone cases, headphones, selfie stick, fish eye filter thingy, etc), and of course, food and drinks! While you can find the same food in the restaurants nearby, you must try to go for the street vendors at least one during your trip.

The firs item I would recommend to you is what locals call as Moo Ping, which is directly translated to grilled pork. It isn’t just your traditional grilled pork. Here in Thailand, we take pride in marinating our pork in a mixture of sauces, garlic and other seasonings. All the hard work results in really, super, extremely delicious grilled pork that’s heavenly. Whenever I go back to Thailand and see Moo Ping, I would buy at least two skewers with no second thought. If it’s the first thing I see in the morning, then I will buy four skewers, and a small bag of sticky rice, and that ladies and gentlemen, is my breakfast. BBQ pork and rice for breakfast, I must be insane. But you have to try it, it’s amazing. One pork skewer could go from 10 to 20 baht, and a small bag of sticky rice sits between 5 to 10 baht. With this, you could enjoy a delicious and very traditional Thai snack (or you could buy six skewers and two bags of sticky rice and make it a meal, like I would) for under two Australia dollars. Whether it’s for breakfast, lunch, dinner or none of these, I would pick these awesome grilled pork and skewers over a fancy meal in a restaurant any day.

The second hawker style snack I want to share with you guys Fried Fish Balls. These are the exact same fish balls that thrown into your Thai noodle dishes. They’re made more fish that’s been minced and blended, and then incorporated with flour to make like a dough sort of material. Once you get mini balls out of them, you could either deep-fry them or boil them. Since I’m on holidays and there’s no better excuse to spoil yourself, I always go for the fried option. These are either fried until crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, or quick fried for the balls to quickly cook up. The thing I like about this snack is that the vendors always drain the balls and let them rest for a short period before putting them into a bag for you. This way, you’re not served deep-fried fish balls that are oily and soak up the oil. That wouldn’t be very pleasant. They fish balls go really well with the sauce, which is usually home made by the vendors. There are usually two sauces you could choose from, a hot and spicy one, and a not so hot and spicy one. The option that’s less spicy tends to be a bit sweeter, which is also really nice. This depends on how spicy you prefer your food, but if you wanna try, you could ask the vendor to separate the balls into two bags, and add each of the sauce in separate bags. Good idea eh? The tough part would be to explain this though.. but I’m sure with the help of sign language and a polite smile, the vendor would understand.

And that does it for now for this version of what to eat on the streets of Bangkok. I will try to dig up some pictures for what to drink in Bangkok and will try to get that going soon!

Just one last piece of advise for traveling within Bangkok, is that you should try to trade in the bigger bank notes for smaller change. Try to keep a few 20 baths notes and a few 100 notes in your wallet rather than bigger 500 and 1000 notes. Try to also have coins handy as the vendors may lack change sometimes.