The street I live on is nearly as famous for cheap food as it is for cheap sex. You can't avoid either of these - when my four-year-old son and I bicycle down the road in the late afternoon we have to swerve past vendors' carts selling fried insects, and hold our breath to get through the smoke that rises from pavement stalls frying chilli paste in hot oil. As we ride he waves 'Hello, ladies of the night!' at the women who pose outside the Charming Bar and Sky Rocket's for the passing male tourists. At them he likes to shout 'Pervert!', as his mum does. It livens up the trip to the shops.
When we left England to live in Bangkok, we were warned that we'd miss seasons. Thailand did not have proper ones, just hot months, hotter months and the ones when it was both hot and wet. But we've learnt to chart the year by the changing food and the changing people on Soi Nana, our street. Sex and food have their seasons too. At the moment it's new mango month, a time of celebration. Thai friends bring a couple of pale yellow-green young mangoes when they come over to our house; our landlady sends over a big bag of the rock hard blue-green ones when we pay the rent.
At first we had no idea what to do with these except wait for them to ripen - now we know that you can carve them into sharp woody slivers and crunch them with grilled asparagus with lime juice squeezed over. As they get a little yellower the taste is delicate and refreshing - nothing like the turgid chemical sweetness of imported mangoes in Europe. In our street the fruit vendors are now selling green mango and crisp young papaya with a little bag of salt, sugar and ground chilli to dip them in. Grated, the green fruits are the base of the salads - som tam or yam, that most Thais eat every day. So for anyone who likes food - and I've never heard of a Thai who doesn't - it's a momentous time, much more so than, say, the arrival of spring lamb in Britain or the first asparagus of the season.
As the year goes on, other fruits and vegetables that are central to living and eating here turn up. Each one, the new chillis, the new jasmine rice, is celebrated in street festivals and by the barking of vendors' megaphones as they tour the neighbourhood selling the crop from the back of grimy pick-ups. In the office where I work, a plate of the new fruits gets laid out by the photocopier for everyone to sample: glistening, chewy jackfruit in January; then durian - a fleshy green monster with dinosaur's skin and a smell like camembert in the car boot a month after you forgot it; the new mangosteens that arrive in May, and two cousins of the lychee, the hairy rambutan and tangy longan around July. In my second year here I know enough to miss fruits that disappear annoyingly from the supermarket shelves - strange for a European used to year-round non-stop supplies - and look forward to their return. After the rice harvest, and during the floods of October and November, young women from the poor rural hinterlands in the country's north-east arrive looking to feed their families by working a different crop - the single male tourist flying in from northern Europe.
The travelling sex connoisseurs know our street well; it's slightly more upmarket than the better-known Patpong. The prices asked to rent a body in the beer bars of Soi Nana drop as the year ends and more women arrive. The food that the street vendor carts sell changes to cater for the influx. People of Isaan, Thailand's northern region, like charcoal-grilled chicken when they're feeling rich, and fried insects, always. The tourists gawp at the stalls heaped with scorpions, locusts and the large greenish beetle that looks like a cockroach. It is in fact a water insect that feeds on rice plants. You'll see an occasional drunken Westerner choking down a scorpion for his mates; all evening you'll see tired young girls in their comedy mini-miniskirts and halter-tops filling a plastic bag of crispy invertebrates, to chop up and eat with rice and a dash of nam phrik, chilli and shrimp jam: protein-filled comfort food to remind them of home.
Sometimes, walking home down Nana at the end of an evening out, we stop at the charcoal grill outside a noisy pick-up bar called Big Dogs (my wife wants to open a rival establishment next door and call it Pathetic Puppies) to eat little kebabs of chicken, pineapple and chilli and watch the perverts. Combining street snacks and sex- tourist-watching is a pleasant Bangkok pastime; it's not quite the same as eating ice cream on the Spanish Steps or oysters by the Liffey, but the kebabs are good and the European men gruesomely fascinating.
They all look the same. If all you knew of Western males was the street theatre of Nana you would decide that farang are bald, round- bellied, mostly foul-tempered and tragically badly-goateed. Every week the hotels on Nana fill with another batch, all in the same baggy shorts, all looking to get laid. Getting laid and getting fed are equally easy on my street.
Nana is a place of down-to-earth pleasures - beer, sex and food. The Thai word for 'street four', Nana's official name, means 'shagging' in the Isaan dialect. Taxi drivers wink and grin if you ask to go there. And while the sex tourists are pretty much the same, the food is not. The food is ever changing. Walk down my street in the early morning and there are a dozen stalls selling breakfast. At this time, the girlie bars are shuttered, and without the neon the street is a sagging mess of grey concrete, the pavement sticky with last night's residues.
There are exhausted bar girls and lady-boys, make-up smudged, on their way home, a farang tourist too drunk to find his hotel, office workers sitting side-saddle on taxi-motorbikes, West African women sailing across the road, in their piles of cotton print curled and coiffed like meringues.
This is the land of non-stop eating, and as the clock turns so the food changes. Breakfast of many nations is available on Nana. In a block known as Little Africa you can buy the tasteless yellow doughnuts made from maize meal that starts the day for the Nigerians and Liberians who sell printed cloths and trade in diamonds in the alleys. An alley further, at Sheherazade - the best Lebanese restaurant east of, well, Beirut - groups of Arab men eat omelettes of spring onion and coriander with stacks of Frisbee-sized flat bread on the side.
'Full English break-fast' say the signs in the doorways of the sex-tourist hotels - one of these promises 'Entrails' as well, and is never very busy. The fruit vendors are pushing their carts, selling ready-sliced watermelon and jackfruit, melon, mango and papaya, best eaten with a banana-leaf wrapped ball of sticky rice. Thai breakfast at the vendors' carts is a typically long menu: rice broth, fried noodles, sesame seed-studded banana fritters, rice porridge with pork, the ubiquitous deep fried taro balls - a sweet little doughnut in batter light enough to blow away.
If every hour is a mealtime in Thailand, any vacant space on the pavement is room enough for a restaurant - a ramshackle hand-drawn cart and a few plastic chairs. By mid-morning the pavement is becoming an obstacle course. The street vendors who were selling rice broth and fried flat noodles out of little gas-fired tureens in their carts to hurrying workers have now become little bistros. A few PVC chairs, a tin table and a parasol: and they're ready. This could be gaeng, the classic Thai curry on rice offered to you in England as 'Green or Red' and the Bangkokian-Chinese staple, the gway tiew naam - the bowl of rice noodles, meat, herbs and soup that must be one of the most eaten fast- food dishes in the world.
I've eaten noodle broth in Wagamama, I've eaten it in Hong Kong, but it wasn't until I came here that I developed any understanding of the glories of it, the life-enhancing, bowl-scraping satisfaction to be had from it. (If anyone wants to dig further into noodle broth and quasi-sexual obsession, see the film Tampopo .) Bangkok is obsessed - taxi drivers will agree to take on a particularly horrendous trip across town simply on the grounds that there's a celebrated gway tiew rot kheng - noodle vendor's cart - in the street you're heading for.
It's best when it's simple. There are people in Bangkok who will rave about hard-to-find Chinatown restaurants where there's a guay tiew made with red pork stock and noodle-wrapped shrimp ravioli, but before getting fancy, it's important that you know the basics. And that is a tin table under a tatty umbrella in my street. Try to push a pram through the pavement bistro and, even in this land of habitual politeness, you will not get far. Interrupt the noodles? You foreigners are mad! say the raised eyebrows. Watch a businessman or a cabbie dealing with his lunchtime noodles and you realise it's a concentrated exercise whose essence and pleasure is in rhythm and continuity. You get the bowl, you tilt it, taste the stock, lower it, dig in the chopsticks, pull out noodles, meat, vegetables, swallow, tilt, drink, and so on until you've upended it for the last lukewarm slurp. You might as well interrupt an express train. It is a foundation of Bangkok social intercourse, and if two people have quarrelled you can say of them, 'Not talking? Well, they're not eating noodles_'
The vendor has a big vat of bubbling stock - dark brown and mysterious. This is the key to the enterprise, and it may be a stock started by a grandmother decades ago. You indicate from the rot kheng's stack of ingredients what you'd like - strips of beef, or pork, chicken giblets, little rolled sausage balls of beef, shrimp, chicken or seaweed. A little beef and some beef balls is good for me. Choose your noodle size - there's three different gauges of the ice-white rice noodles in hanks at the front of the stall - and with a handful of coriander and of beansprouts, everything goes into a wire basket that's dropped in a pan of water sitting in the stock. Thirty seconds later - the basket is upended over a plastic bowl, a ladle of the stock plumped on top and you're away. They'll put it in a plastic bag tied up with a rubber band, or you can eat it on the spot.
If it's really good you'll know because the stock will be the thing you want more of; the beef and beansprouts just adding a pleasant crunch and chew to the complex thrills of the tangy, salty-sweet soup, all the more delicious because - though you can guess a little - you've no idea what's in it. The noodle station at my favourite restaurant on Nana, the Popular, has a stock vat that has been going 47 years - that's what Suchada, the head chef says.
The Popular's noodle stock was started by her mother and has never been empty. Usually Suchada is happy to explain what goes in the lunch she cooks me but she was more coy about the noodle stock. Four or five different types of soy sauce, she muttered, beef bones and 'red whisky' to break them down. Blood. And herbs. What herbs? Delving into the rubbish bin-sized vat, she showed me a gnarled branch of galangal - a coarse root related to ginger - as long as my forearm. Herbs like that. Why did I want to know her secrets, anyway? asked Suchada. Was I planning to open a restaurant?
It's not unusual to eat blind here. It's one of the thrills of arriving on this alien gastronomic planet. It took a while before I found out that the hairy orange sweetmeat my son and I had been happily scoffing wasn't a coarse kind of candyfloss, but in fact dried, shredded pork. And oh, how my Thai colleagues laughed when I told them that. They laughed even harder when I discovered - gagging slightly in front of them - that the curiously tough-textured mushrooms I'd been eating with relish at office lunch most days for a year were in fact sautéed hunks of preserved beef tripe.
Office lunch takes place most days in the Popular. It's further down Soi Nana, where the No Bra Bars peter out and NGO offices begin to sprout instead. Here there's remnants of an older Bangkok. Close by runs a khlong, a stretch of fetid canal, a reminder of the days when the city transported itself by water, along which is a small but intriguing slum of wooden huts, where my son and I go to watch the 'angry chickens', training for cockfights.
The Popular looks like a thousand other places selling street food. But the crowd of taxi drivers and policemen who turn up there each lunchtime are the restaurant's best advert. It is now run and staffed by five brothers and sisters, with other cousins and relatives helping out. Suchada runs the kitchen while her brother Somkiet looks after the till - Pha, another sister, is in charge of the boiled ducks, the restaurant's speciality, and another fries the omelette dishes.
Suchada and Somkiet say that nothing has changed in the 50 years since their mother opened the restaurant except that the menu has got a little larger. That's 98 dishes. I've had them all except nam khu gai, which is, of course, preserved chicken ankles in cashews and chilli.
Foreigners come to Soi Nana and do silly things - I came here and I fell in love with a restaurant. It's the Popular, and it's the real thing. Much more real, at least, than my fling with the Sugar Club, or the affair with the French House dining rooms that took up so much of my London youth. This relationship is cheaper, for a start - a lunch at the Popular leaves you change out of £1.50, and I have lunch there at least four times a week.
At the Popular I have begun, slowly, to learn my way through the awesome maze of Thai food. This is chiefly thanks to my colleagues. The office is just across Nana, and we go down to the Popular at noon most days. They order, I eat: a spoon in my right hand, a fork in my left (chopsticks are only for noodles). We get stalks of morning glory fried in fish sauce and oil, with nuggets of garlic and chilli; slices of soused duck breast with a soy and ginger sauce, a white fish steaming in a tin plate over a flame, covered in lemon grass and coriander - we eat the fish and then drink the liquid it was poached in.
Usually we order shellfish. My obsession with or suan is an office joke - I've never satisfactorily explained to my colleagues why this dish of oysters in a batter and egg omelette served sizzling in an iron plate on a pile of beansprouts seems such an extraordinary luxury to me: no one believes me when I tell them a single oyster in England would cost three times as much as the plate of or suan.
The other great indulgence at the Popular is a delicate red curry of cockles, arriving in their shells like Italian vongole, and garnished with basil. Impressed by this subtle and clever dish - how do you protect the delicate cockle flavour from being steamrollered by the full-on sauce? - I asked Suchada the chef to let me watch her cook it. It took her all of two minutes.
There's always a salad, a yam of grated green mango or papaya, with shallot, chopped chilli, mint leaves, toasted cash-ews and some form of protein - chopped squid, curls of tender raw beef or tiny dried little shrimps. It may have glass noodles in it. Poured over it is lime juice, mashed garlic, sugar and a dash of fish sauce a dressing of such crisp and brilliant simplicity it demands an immediate space on the world's salad bars.
There are a thousand variations to this staple salad: a favourite is Yam plaa khao san -as above, but tossed with handfuls of tiny, dried fish, each of them as small as a grain of rice, which is what plaa khao san means - 'fish like unpolished rice'. A mouthful of this is a mealy, thoughtful experience, sharpened by the lime and chilli. These, you're told, are not just a dressing but also a guaranteed killer of bugs.
I've never been ill after lunch at the Popular - using the basic lore of always eating somewhere busy - there's no reason why street food here should hurt anyone. After a few awful accidents, I'm slowly acclimatising to the chilli, though I know I have limits. When shopping you avoid the tiniest - mouse-dropping chillis, the Thais call them - because in any practical quantities they are simply beyond European capacities. But at lunch now I cockily help myself from the communal bowl of nam plaa, fermented fish sauce with chopped chilli in it, that acts as seasoning.
We eat for about 30 minutes. We all, Thais and farang, drink litres of iced water and then we split the bill - usually about £1 each. I weigh slightly less than I did when I left London.
I go back to work feeling very happy. 'Khao mai, plaa maan' - 'new rice, juicy fish' - say the Thais to describe a good time. For the Thais, the connection between happiness in the stomach and happiness of the heart is well-acknowledged. Food should also be fun. Thai colleagues return from Europe, and after politely complaining about the weather they will more seriously address the problem of our food - 'bland', of course, but also 'boring'. Not fun. This is food as good as I've ever eaten and I could eat it for ever. The fish are juicy, and the rice is new.
Hoy lay phad phrik phao
Cockles in chilli sauce with basil
300g or approx 30 fresh cockles in their shells (also known as baby clams or vongole), rinsed
2 dsp chilli paste - naam phrik
1-2 tsp fresh red chillis - chopped
cup of chicken or vegetable stock
1 tbsp finely chopped shallot
1 dsp chopped and crushed garlic
1 tbsp fish sauce - naam plaa (oyster sauce or a light soy sauce will do)
1 cup basil leaves, coarsely chopped
vegetable oil
boiled or steamed rice for two
serves two
Cook the rice in advance. In a large wok or frying pan heat two tablespoons of oil until smoking. Add the garlic. Add the chicken stock and reheat. Throw in the cockles and stir for 90 seconds until they are opening. Remove any that won't open and throw away.
Keep the pan very hot and stir in two dessert spoons of the chilli paste, the chopped chilli, fish sauce and the shallot. Cook for 30 seconds. Throw in the basil leaves. Serve immediately with the rice.
· Anyone who wants to travel in Thailand and eat adventurously should get a copy of Joe Cummings' invaluable World Food Thailand, published by Lonely Planet, £7.99.
