Where to Find Bangkok’s Best Street Food Stalls: This Book Can Help

Where to find Bangkok’s best street food stalls

When you first arrive in Thailand’s capital city, you’ll realize quickly how impossible it would be to find the best street food stalls in Bangkok. Why? There are too many of them.

Tens of thousands of food stalls, in fact, on every major street in the city and on thousands of smaller streets too. Day and night, Thais and resident expats flock to these stalls for the tastiest street food in Bangkok and, of course, the cheapest prices.

So, as a newbie in Thailand, how can you figure out which Bangkok food stalls are the ones to try? Easy, and there’s a book, Bangkok’s Top 50 Street Food Stalls, that can help.

The book is written by a Thai-American, Chawadee Nualkhair, who ate at more than 150 of the better known Bangkok food stalls before she narrowed her list down to the top 50. While, of course, these really aren’t the top 50 street food stalls in Bangkok (you’d spend literally years of your life eating at all of them to find out which ones are, and then have to begin again at the new ones that had sprung up since you started), the book does give you a great place to begin.

In it, you’ll find food stalls in easily accessible areas of Bangkok that offer a huge variety of Thai food. Chawadee gives you an idea of the food they serve, what’s best to order and has even taken photographs of each stall so you know what it looks like.

My only complaint was the maps, while cute, were sometimes a bit difficult to figure out and that’s coming from me, a 10-year Bangkok resident. That’s why, if you are having trouble finding the street but are in the general vicinity, just show the photograph of the stall to a passing Thai and they’ll get you there in no time.

In Bangkok, you’ll find the Bangkok’s Top 50 Street Food Stalls at Kinokuniya, Asia Books, Suvarnabhumi Airport bookshops and other bookstores around the city.