budget food

Road stall hideaway hawker food (2)

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On our previous holidays in Pattaya we would book family-suite hotel rooms/apartments located at Jomtien Beach road, where you couldn’t get passed this hawker food place. Easy to drop in for a quick bite, lunch or dinner, just great dishes with lots of taste on top of that these hawker stalls fit in any budget. Always jam-packed with tourists and locals, can’t go wrong with the stir-fried food in here, the dishes are prepared in woks literally dancing on fiery flames. Make no mistake, we have burned our lips more than once thinking it wasn’t that hot on more than chillies only.

The hawker food place in the pictures is the one where the 7-11 shop entrance is practically build inside this road stall, also recognizable with the salt-crusted barbecue fish on street-side display.

The Som Tam food stall is located at Dongtan Beach in White House, almost next door to Nongmaii Beach Cafe. This is also the only stall where I would order the Som Tam Puma, Papaya Salad with the local delicacy of salted black mini-crabs without having any after trouble. The trick of a good prepared Som Tam is besides fresh ingredients, the pounding and scraping without making it in a mush but just soft enough retaining a crunch with a tangy-sweet-hot dressing perfectly clinging on.

 

Early bird hawker food (1)

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On my list of favourite hawker food you will find the simple Thai Chicken Noodle Soup as mentioned in another blog post, followed closely by Som Tam, Thai Papaya Salad and Gai Yang Gai known as barbecue chicken. The last two items are often combined together for lunch as snack.

Thai hawker food – Gai Yang Gai

Early bird hawker food, every morning when we crossed the road to get a songtel ride for the beach, this food stall was grilling rows of  Gai Yang Gai and before noon he would be sold out.

Gai Yang Gai – Thai barbecue chicken

Isn’t this just mouthwatering just by looking at it? Well smelling Thai rubbed spice chicken on the grill makes it even more tantalizing, such a shame we kept on missing out. We were either going for breakfast or coming back from the beach looking at an empty grill.

Som Tam Papaya salad

The slightly tart flavour of the young and green papaya combined with the heat of red chilli, saltiness of  fish sauce and tamarind juice, with a little bit sweetness of palm sugar mixed all together is just gob-smacking good! Passing by one of these stalls I saw a pot filled with salted small black crabs, apparently that’s a popular local version, while I never tried the fried bugs I sure tried the black crab Papaya salad and if you like saltiness this is the one.

Tropical fresh fruit with full flavour

Fresh cut tropical fruits, explosion of taste and fruitiness and so many varieties to choose from it is just hard work :-). Here you can and should eat loads of Rambutan, Mangosteen or Jackfruit to name a few. These are hard to get in Europe and taste not even half as good when you have the chance to have them almost freshly plucked into your mouth.