What to eat in Bangkok
11 dishes, from pad thai to street food

Start here. Thin rice noodles fired in a hot wok with a sweet-sour tamarind sauce, egg, tofu and dried or fresh prawns, finished with crushed peanuts, a squeeze of lime, and chili flakes you add yourself. The whole point is the balance — sour, sweet and salty pulling against each other in one plate. The legendary shops fry each portion to order over charcoal until the edges catch a little smoke; plenty of street carts do a startlingly good version at half the price.

The soup the whole world can pronounce. Lemongrass, kaffir lime leaf, galangal, chilies and lime sharpen a broth built around river or sea prawns. It comes two ways: clear (nam sai), clean and sharp, or creamy (nam khon), rounded out with milk and chili paste. Nearly every Thai restaurant makes it, but the version people fly in for is Jay Fai's dry tom yum, reduced until the sauce clings to the prawns. Fair warning — the price is as legendary as the cook. An ordinary restaurant bowl at a few hundred baht is already a very good time.

The easy meal Bangkok eats every week — silky poached chicken sliced over rice cooked in the poaching broth until it's rich and fragrant, with a bowl of winter-gourd soup and a ginger-chili fermented-bean sauce that separates the real shops from the rest. The most famous name in town is Go-Ang Pratunam, the "pink-shirt chicken rice," going since around 1960 and holding a Michelin Bib Gourmand year after year. The queue looks long but moves fast, because everything is ready at the chopping block.

Pork or beef noodles in miniature bowls, once sold from paddle boats on the canals. The broth is dark, spiced and deeply savoury, with noodles, meat, balls and morning glory packed into a few spoonfuls. Because each bowl costs pocket change, the culture is to keep ordering — five to ten bowls each, stacking the empties into a tower to compare. The most famous spot is the lane beside Victory Monument, where boat-noodle shops line up one after another. If noodles are your thing, another legend worth knowing is Wattana Panich in Ekkamai — not true boat noodles, but a beef-stew pot the shop is said to have kept simmering and topping up for decades.

Pork marinated in turmeric and coconut milk, threaded onto skewers and grilled over charcoal until the edges char and the fat smells irresistible. It comes with a thick, gently sweet peanut sauce and ajat — a quick relish of cucumber, shallot and chili in vinegar — that cuts the richness exactly right. You'll find it at evening street grills, markets and food courts all over town. Ten skewers is the standard order, because nobody's hand stops at five. Eat it as a warm-up before a bigger meal, or sit down and make it the meal with toasted bread.

The double act from Isan, Thailand's northeast, that became everyday food for the entire city. Shredded green papaya is pounded in a mortar with chilies, garlic, tomato and long beans, balanced sour-sweet-salty-hot to order. Versions run from the gentle som tam Thai to the deep, funky fermented-crab-and-fish style. Eat it with smoky grilled chicken and warm sticky rice. There's an Isan shop in nearly every soi in Bangkok, from roadside shelters to air-conditioned places in malls. New to it? Start with som tam Thai, no fermented fish, and name your spice level — "phet noi" (mildly spicy) is a phrase vendors hear all day.

Pork leg braised in a five-spice soy broth until the skin turns soft and springy and the meat falls apart under a spoon, served over rice with blanched greens, pickled mustard, boiled egg and a garlicky vinegar-chili sauce you should spoon on to cut the richness. Few dishes show the Thai-Chinese roots of Bangkok's food more clearly. The veteran shops are shophouses and market-front carts that have kept their own pot and their own recipe going for decades — when the five-spice smell drifts across the pavement, that's your cue to stop.

Ask a Thai person what to eat when nothing comes to mind, and the answer is krapao. Minced pork (or chicken, beef, seafood) flash-fried on high heat with garlic, chilies and holy basil — a herb with a peppery fragrance like nothing else — served over rice with a crisp-edged fried egg whose yolk is meant to run into everything. Every made-to-order shop in every soi cooks it; it's cheap, it's fast, and it's the truest test of a kitchen. A shop that fries krapao with real basil fragrance can be trusted with almost anything on the menu.

Rice simmered until the grains dissolve into a thick, silky porridge, with hand-formed pork meatballs, offal if you like, a soft-poached egg, and slivered ginger and spring onion on top. It's the breakfast Bangkok grew up on, and many shops also run deep into the night for the after-work and after-party crowd. The old quarters around Yaowarat have big-pot jok going from before dawn. For the full old-school Thai-Chinese breakfast, On Lok Yun — a heritage coffee shop going since 1933 — is nearby, serving pan-fried eggs, custard toast, and the strong, sweet tea and coffee Bangkok has drunk for close to a century.

Thailand's most famous dessert right now — ripe, fragrant mango beside sticky rice soaked in sweetened coconut milk, with a salty-sweet coconut drizzle and crunchy mung beans on top. It genuinely lives and dies by the season: mango season, roughly March to June, is the golden window, with nam dok mai mangoes at their best around April–May. The other treat to chase on a hot day is lod chong — pandan-scented rice-flour strands in iced sweet coconut milk. A Yaowarat institution everyone calls "Lod Chong Singapore" has sold it for decades (the name comes from an old cinema nearby, not the country).

Bangkok drinks coffee in two worlds at once. The old world is oliang — dark, sweet iced coffee brewed through a cloth sock — and the famous orange Thai tea, thick with condensed milk, both poured at carts and shophouse counters for pocket change. The new world is a serious specialty scene, with cafés around Charoen Krung, Ari and Thonglor pulling shots and brewing filters at competition level. You can do both in a day without trying — oliang on the pavement in the morning, a slow filter in the air-conditioning by afternoon.