street food in ayutthaya

.
I've finally reached my last post about our trip to Ayutthaya...

and, unsurprisingly, it's all about food.

At the riverside night market in Ayutthaya we explored the rows of stalls offering all sorts of wonderfully mysterious foodstuffs before settling on some seafood from this woman's stand..

grilled cuttlefish and squid-on-a-stick

To order, you point to the raw proteins you want (we chose squid, cuttlefish and some meat/veggie shishkabobs), she brushes them down with some sort of marinade, puts them on the hot grill and lets them cook for a few minutes. She tosses the grilled meat into individual bags and ladles some sweet/spicy/tangy sauces over the bags' contents before handing them over.


One of the foods that Ayutthaya is apparently known for is Roti Sai Mai. Street vendors all over the city offer these plastic bags of paper-thin green crepe-like roti. Along with the roti you're given a plastic bag of this green/pink/white sugar floss (similar to cotton candy, but chewier and denser). To eat, you pull off a pinch of the floss and roll it up in a sheet of roti. I think they must use glutinous rice flour in the roti batter because the result is chewy and elastic. and it's almost unbearably sweet.

amelia prepares a roti roll

roti sai mai

As an afternoon snack after our roti, we happened upon one of the millions of rolling deepfrying street vendors on a street corner by our hostel. We bought a styrofoam bowl of hardboiled quail eggs wrapped in won ton wrappers, deepfried to chewy, crispy, fatty perfection and drizzled with sweet chili sauce...

fried, eggy, doughy nuggets
.

two thai classics on thonglor

.
This post recounts the events of an evening in July, during Amelia's visit...

For her first dinner in Bangkok I took millie to a Thonglor, a sidestreet off of Sukhumvit (the main artery connecting my province to bkk) well known for its street food vendors. One of the more famous vendors is the phat thai guy stationed right on the corner as you turn off the main road into the alley. It's almost always the same guy furiously tossing a wok full of noodles over a pit of leaping flames - a dramatic sight at nighttime - and he makes what, I guess, is a pretty good phat thai. but I'm not partial to the dish, really, so maybe I'm not the best judge. In any case, that's where millie and I and my friends nz and dai went for dinner. We bought a couple of Singha beers to share, and squished together on plastic stools at a little aluminum table in the crowded alley.

nz and dai weave through the alley looking for an open seat

my order (chicken phat thai, spicy)
- that's a chunk of banana flower on the upper left of the plate

millie's order (chicken phat thai, slightly less spicy)

After cleaning our plates I showed millie the real reason we came here...

mangoes and sticky rice with sweet/salty coconut cream!

Even when mangoes aren't in season (like now), this place serves this sweet, creamy, chewy dessert. They charge way more than you normally pay during mango season, but it's worth it every once in a while.

.