My Choice

• 5 Sukhumvit Soi 36
• Bangkok

They say that you can’t trust a skinny chef. But you can trust a fat food critic — provided they are as uncompromisingly witty and endlessly knowledgeable as Jeffrey Steingarten. That was my hope, anyway, after reading both his books (each wonderful, by the way). His essay on Thailand in It Must Have Been Something I Ate quickly mentions a small restaurant in Bangkok called My Choice, and my timing in reading this could not have been better. My own little food foray into Asia was just a few days away, and that city was to be my last stop. So as I stepped off the plane that first evening in Bangkok, I had not yet booked a hotel and I didn’t know a single word of Thai, but at least I had a dinner plan.

Walking in the door, I encountered an ambiance that is the very definition of “hip.” If the shiny plastic table covers, lush fake greenery, and mismatched chairs weren’t enough, there were six — count ‘em… six! — other beautiful people there to see and be seen. Take, for example, the decrepit old white guy (think George Carlin) with the cute Thai “girlfriend” half his height and one-fourth his age… they were so happy to be there that they said not a word to each other the entire meal! The food must be that amazing, I thought to myself.

Well, somewhat surprisingly, it was. This dinner turned out to be a great introduction for what was to be a glorious week of eating in Bangkok. It was also my first indication that the best food in Bangkok is to be had either on the street or in restaurants such as this one, with decor befitting a prison, a mechanic’s shop, a dilapidated 1960s-style hotel lobby, or perhaps some beautiful combination of all three.

Without a translator or a knowledge of Thai sign language, I was sadly unable to say “Please fill my table with the most delicious food your restaurant offers.” So I resorted to the next best thing — the “Recommended” section of the menu. Seeing such tried-and-true family favorites as fried fish intestines and stir-fried fermented egg, I knew making just a few choices would not be easy. But noticing the hot and spicy ratings ranging from 0 to 3 stars, I simply choose three dishes with a range of different spice levels.

The first to arrive was yam thua phu, a spicy winged bean salad (#2 on the menu, and a spice rating of 1* for those playing along at home). This delicious salad included winged beans, fried shallots, peanuts, chicken, shrimp, coconut milk, nam pla (fish sauce), sugar, lime juice, dried chilies and who knows what else. Crunchy, tender, crispy, hot, cool, salty, sour, spicy and sweet all at once, this dish did what great Thai food often does — it left me running out of adjectives to describe the harmonious complexity at work. These were my first few bites in Bangkok, and I was already smiling.

Next came the silent killer, gaeng tai pla. Poetically translated on the menu as “fish viscera sauce chili soup” (#17; 3*), I now know it by another name: the absolute spiciest thing I have ever eaten. There were a lot of flavors at work in this soup: shrimp, cauliflower, winged bean, kaffir lime leaves, kaffir lime quarters with the rind removed, baby corn, fresh hot peppers, long beans, lemongrass, ginger, garlic, shallot, tamarind, dried chilies, shrimp paste, and of course fish (mackerel, from what I’ve read) viscera. The chili paste that served as the soup base gave it a dark chocolate color and a fiery kick that only intensified as I continued to eat it. The sticky rice and sliced cucumber served alongside the soup did little to douse the flames. Nevertheless, the soup was delicious, so I decided to grin and cry and sweat and turn red bear it. I would highly recommend ordering this soup, but consider yourself warned: a native Thai person may ask you later on, as they did me, “Wait… you ate that? So spicy!”. They mean it.

My final choice was, thankfully, a bit more tame: stir fried coconut tip with shrimp (#30; 0*). While there were no phantom chilies hiding in the mix here, the flavors were still quite balanced. No small feat for a dish that I’m pretty certain would be overly sweet if I’d ordered it in a Thai restaurant in the United States. While I’m not sure what exactly was in the sauce (by this point, my taste buds had been assaulted by the soup), it was a far cry from the kind of sticky-sweet, cornstarch-thickened sauces I’d been encountering during the prior week in Shanghai. A few scattered chunks of green onion also helped keep the natural sweetness of the coconut in check.

I hadn’t planned on getting dessert, but if you had eaten that soup, you would have, too. Trust me. Quietly exposing the fact that the only Thai words I had learned thus far (from the handy cheat sheet I tore from a Thai Airways magazine) were, not surprisingly, food-related, I ordered ai-tim gathi. Just like the wonderful street snack I encountered again and again on this trip, this coconut ice cream came complete with mix-ins you wouldn’t exactly find at your neighborhood Baskin-Robbins. But eschewing the basil seeds, millet, red beans, and laht chong (bright green noodles flavored and colored by pandanus leaf) one might find at a street stall, this version simply had corn and small chunks of young coconut mixed throughout. Quite tasty, and just enough of the mix-ins to keep this dessert’s texture interesting without distracting from its creaminess.

On a small soi much further down Sukhumvit Road than most tourists would likely be willing to venture, this place is a bit off the beaten path. But getting there couldn’t be easier — it’s literally a 1-minute walk from the Thong Lo BTS station — and there is certainly reward in seeking it out. There is a large menu of traditional Thai favorites to explore, and it’s location and decor ensure that the only people you’ll encounter are those who, like you, care first and foremost about the food. The price is right, too, coming in at about 355 baht (roughly $11) for a meal that (let’s face it) could have easily fed two. Definitely recommended.