The street food culture in Thailand

Street food is where people are in Thailand: everywhere. All along the streets and even between two cities, you can find some stands selling food and drinks.

This street food culture can be explained with several reasons, including the sense of service highly developed in the Thai society. Meals are so inexpensive and delicious that everyone prefers to eat in the street with friends than wasting their time cooking at their place. In the cities, and particularly in Bangkok, many Thai do not have their own kitchen; this is why you will see many of them eating in the street.

From the touristic parts to the most distant from the city center, it is easy to find people who sale meat skewers, fruits or even fried rice with chicken. Thai people even say that the best sois (streets) to live in is where there is a lot of street food… Bigger the soi is, more likely you are to find street food… that is why some sois are more popular than others.
There are different types of street food. Some restaurants are quite big and offer a wide selection of meals, while many of the street stands offer only one meal, such as chicken noodles, or octopus skewers…

One of the characteristics of street food is that you can find it day and night. These little street restaurants are often open either in the morning, in the afternoon or in the evening. Most of the time, they open at specific hours and adapt themselves to the clients.

But some of them are open 24h/24, while many restaurants in the city open only until 3 or 4 am. When in Europe, eating at any time is considered as a privilege, in Thailand, it is the rule.

If most of the street restaurants have tables and chair to enjoy your meal in the street, you can also ask for take away and eat it at your place.

To keep with the service tradition, it is even possible to be delivered at home, thanks to the numerous taxis moto in the streets. Beyond their first job of taxi, they become a steed to bring your food home…

In the streets, you can also find itinerant stands that sell fruits and ice cream. Each of them starts to play music when they enter the street: to facilitate the process, each music stand for the kind of product he is selling (fruits, vegetables, ice creams…).