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Street Chef in a City That Loves Its Food Cityscape/Bangkok

Posted on: Monday, 3 April 2006, 12:00 CDT

By Thomas Fuller

The world's great cities often lay claims to culinary excellence, but perhaps in no other place are the aromas and sights of food so ever-present, the residents so preoccupied with their next meal and casual conversations so frequently devoted to eating as in this massive, sweaty metropolis.

There are at least 43,000 street food vendors in Bangkok, the municipal government says, a legion of operators of food carts crammed into every available nook of urban real estate. Among them is Sompong Seetha, who for eight years has risen well before dawn to make his popular rendition of chicken rice, the specialty from the Chinese island of Hainan that combines tender boiled chicken with a spicy, ginger-laced soy sauce, served on a bed of rice and accompanied by a small bowl of broth.

"This is the only thing I know how to cook," Sompong said one day about 5 a.m., as he shoveled coals onto the lid of a giant cooking pot to steam rice.

Street stalls are the testing ground for Thai cooks, a Darwinian competition to win the hearts and sate the appetites of Bangkok's hungry and often picky 10 million or so residents.

Sompong, 38, was trained to be a sticky-rice farmer in northeast Thailand, a life he left behind because it was not lucrative enough. Today, the serpentine concrete alleyways of central Bangkok are his adopted home.

Bangkok alternately loves and hates its food vendors. The city government banned them from certain areas because they clog traffic, block sidewalks and encourage cockroaches and vermin to multiply in the putrid sewers that food vendors use for trash disposal. One recent article in The Nation, a Bangkok daily, described street vendors as "parasitic elements" whose presence spawns "organized beggars, street-children gangs and hooligans who are responsible for many of the petty crimes in the city center."

But it is difficult to imagine Bangkok without its vendors. Sompong's loyal customers flock to his stall like hungry children to their school cafeteria, an apt analogy because food vendors are known in Thai as "mae kha" or "phaw kha," which translate roughly as "mother trader" or "father trader."

Customers at Sompong's stall are served quickly, but this is not an anonymous fast-food experience. Although taciturn, Sompong connects with his clientele much more than the bored, pimply teenagers who stand behind counters at air-conditioned hamburger franchises do.

Sompong remembers his customers' preferences: dark meat or white. Some women forego the skin because they feel it is too fattening, he said. When he has not seen a customer in a while, he asks why.

Feeding his hundreds of loyal customers involves midnight trips to sprawling night markets, predawn deliveries, the clack-clack- clack of early morning vegetable chopping and the mixing and stirring of what Sompong calls his "secret sauce."

The near miracle of the process is that, for all the hustle and hard work, customers at his stall pay 30 baht, or 75 cents, for a full plate of chicken rice cheap even by Bangkok standards.

Inexpensive but delicious street food fits into the mosaic of Bangkok's luxuries. To foreign tourists and wealthy Thais, this city represents cheap modernity: skyscrapers and swank hotels. Bangkok is the city of the hourlong, $5 foot massage; the $2 air-conditioned taxi ride across town; and the $7 golf caddy, tip included.

But all of this would not be possible without the razor-thin profit margins and long hours of Bangkok's service class, a stream of workers who, like Sompong, hail from Thailand's vast and generally poor hinterland.

Thailand has a population similar to that of France about 60 million people but income is distributed far more unequally than in the West. Nearly a third of Thais live on less than $2 a day, according to the Asian Development Bank, in a separate world from the Mercedes-driving Bangkok elite.

When Sompong left behind his family's small rice farm nine years ago, he arrived at Bangkok's main train station without any idea of what job he would get. He worked for a year at a beef-noodle shop, earning the equivalent of $2.50 a day. But he wanted to own his own stall. So from an Indian loan shark he borrowed 30,000 baht, which at the time was worth $1,200, and started his chicken-rice business. Slowly he built up his customer base and paid back the loan at 20 percent interest.

Food stalls in Bangkok are a great social equalizer. A typical noodle stall, says Robert Halliday, one of Bangkok's premier restaurant experts, can feature shirtless manual workers eating beside well-dressed middle-class Bangkok Thais. "The noodles are good enough to draw the food nuts and cheap enough to draw the laborers," he said.

Sompong's rickety aluminum tables and plastic stools are set out along a small alley, or soi, connected to a dead-end street. It is not an ideal place for a food vendor, given the distance to the closest main road. The address is Soi 7, Lang Suan-Sarasin.

Sompong rents the bottom floor of a wood-shingled house, an anachronism in a high-rent neighborhood that is home to Thailand's stock exchange, tall office buildings and a handful of embassies.

Rising at 3 every morning and working through the stillness of the Bangkok night is a lonely job. Even after the arrival of his assistant, Wilawan Kopaikaew, whom he pays $7.50 a day, there are so many tasks at hand cleaning the chickens, steaming the rice, making the sauce, unfolding the tables that the two exchange barely any words.

"You get used to being alone," Sompong said.

In the hierarchy of Bangkok food vendors, Sompong is a middling player. He leads a relatively comfortable life, earning about $17 a day, jogging every evening in nearby Lumpini park, going to the movies occasionally.

It helps that he is single, having left behind a failed marriage when he left rural Thailand. He lives in a room of less than 10 square meters, or 110 square feet.

Yet Sompong has achieved nowhere near the fame of the superstars of Bangkok street food. A 15-minute walk from Sompong's stall is a family that sells green papaya salad and grilled chicken, a food- stall-cum-restaurant known to most people in the neighborhood as the Soi Polo Som Tam.

Pongsi Sapketsobha, the matriarch, says the family owns one Mercedes, one BMW, one Volvo, and several other cars. She sent her children to private universities, and the family owns a rubber plantation in southern Thailand and "many houses" in the capital.

"Just say that I can buy anything I want," Pongsi said in an interview.

All that from selling green papaya salad and grilled chicken at no more than $3 a plate

Sompong's goals are more modest. He would like to open a massage shop one day, but he will need to serve many more plates of chicken rice to meet that goal. His life savings, he said, is the equivalent of $2,000.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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