The end to Bangkok street food

Continued …

Imagine, if you will, Bangkok’s Chinatown without street food vendors. The current situation is chaotic, admittedly, but it is a Thailand cultural attraction. Crowds jostle along the main avenues, brilliant lights overhead, dining tables and plastic stools spilling into the sidewalks.

This is an experience you don’t get in Sinagpore’s antiseptic hawker centers. And it will be the same for Bangkok – and for the tourists seeking Thailand’s famous street food offerings, who unless they know which building, and which part of the city they are located, their search will be in vain.

Bangkok residents depend on street food for their meals every day, picking up low-priced pork noodles, pork satay, grilled shrimp, or ground pork and rice on their way to work or headed home, or just sitting on a curbside for lunch. These customers are not likely to seek out inconveniently located office food courts.

Inconvenience aside, moving food vendors into food courts inside buildings will raise the cost of the food. Rents, if the vendors were paying any at all, will rise, and food prices will follow. All this to “modernize” Thailand to be more like Singapore? Why?

Bangkok officials are trying to “modernize” the city. Good on that. But let’s be real. Singapore is only “modern” in the downtown section. Travel out to the high-rise living quarters for the people who do the everyday toil, and you will find a much different Singapore. You will find it’s underbelly. Every major city has one. There’s no shame in that.

About 30 million people visited Bangkok last year. Many were just in transit to other destinations in Thailand, but millions of those visitors stayed in the city for at least a day or two. Do you think they will be looking for Bangkok’s famous street food. Without a guide, they will not find it, and if they do, it will be more expensive than it needed to be.

Hiding one of Bangkok’s most important tourist attractions, not to mention a source of daily meals for hundreds of thousands of city residents, is just not a good idea. License the vendors, conduct safety and sanitation checks, kick out the stalls and carts that do not comply. But keep them on the streets – where they can be readily found and where the prices are lower – for tourists and Thais alike.

But whatever Bangkok does, please don’t call it street food if it’s sold in an in-building hawker center/food court. – Expat News

And here’s a better description of the value of Bangkok’s street food:

The world class excellence of Bangkok’s street food

Street food has been an integral part of Thai culture for a long time. It originated from small stalls that, over time, moved to city streets, becoming a part of the lifestyle and a unique characteristic of Bangkok.

For many vendors, cooking is more than just a business. Some street food businesses have been passed down through generations. People rarely write down recipes; instead, they are passed down from parents to children through daily life and the absorption of flavors from one generation to the next. Continued …