The State of the Stomach in Bangkok, Thailand (2025)

Look at Bangkok through the lens of Instagram, a travel article, or a listings website, and these days the city’s restaurant scene can appear to be all about Michelin stars. The brand swept into the city in 2017, and in a short time, chefs and diners alike became obsessed with collecting its celestial accolades. At press time, 35 Bangkok restaurants can claim at least one Michelin star – in 2024, one restaurant earned three – and the company continues to have a massive impact on the city’s dining scene.

Yet look at Bangkok from ground level, and you’ll see a very different picture. The curry shacks, noodle stalls, legacy restaurants, and street vendors that have shaped the city’s dining scene for decades continue to put out some of the best value, casual, unselfconscious, full-flavored, delicious food on earth, all while blissfully unaware of a French tire manufacturer’s rating system. Michelin may have grabbed peoples’ attention, but this has added to, rather than taken away from, Bangkok’s food scene.

There’s perhaps no better view of this jumbled-up food and drink scene than from Bangkok’s oldest districts. Head to Ko Ratanakosin, the artificial island from where Bangkok sprung (and the setting for our Bangkok Tour) and you’ll find Talat Trok Mor, one of the city’s most charming fresh markets, as well as quiet, leafy streets with restaurants and vendors selling central Thai-style snacks and dishes that have disappeared from other parts of the city. A few blocks away, nearly 80-year-old Jay Fai continues to work the woks at her eponymous, semi-open-air shophouse restaurant as she’s done for decades, but these days with long lines, loads of international fans, endorsement deals, a filmography and a Michelin star.

A short tuk-tuk ride away, Soi Nana was a largely ignored strip of ancient shophouses in Bangkok’s Chinatown – a zone whose nightlife could charitably be described as sketchy. Today, the strip is home to some of the city’s most boundary-breaking bars – places such as Tep Bar, where guests combine Thai-themed cocktails and a raucous show of traditional Thai music, or Teens of Thailand, home to a gin-soaked cocktail menu. On Lok Yun, a stuck-in-time Chinese-Thai-run cafe that otherwise might have been left in the dust of Bangkok’s hyper-progressive coffee culture, has gained a new life from visitors wanting to share its ancient interior on Instagram. And you have to walk past street stalls and generations-old mom-and-pop shophouse restaurants before reaching Potong, a Michelin-starred restaurant located in a former Chinese apothecary whose website touts a “5-ELEMENT philosophy” of “Salt, Acid, Spice, Texture, and Maillard Reaction.”

Or head to Bangkok’s newer districts, such as the long strip known as Thanon Sukhumvit, where you may forget which country you’re in altogether. East Asian and western dining concepts can appear to dominate in these parts, and Thais are happy to start the evening with a craft beer from California, eat dinner at a Japanese restaurant whose only foreign branch is in Bangkok, and grab a pack of Butterbear sugar cookies – the city’s latest inexplicable food obsession – to take home.

None of this is new. Bangkok is Thailand’s largest and by far its most influential city, but by no means is it exclusively Thai. The Chinese have had a massive impact on Bangkok since its founding in 1782. Muslims have mingled with Buddhists since the very first days of the city. The Portuguese and the English have also left their mark. And laborers from Thailand’s northeast have been an indelible part of Bangkok since the city’s construction boom of the ‘80s, with Japanese, Korean, and western immigrants moving to the city in recent decades.

All of these groups have impacted – and will continue to impact – what we consider today as Thai food. Don’t believe us? Take phat Thai. By far the most famous Thai dish abroad (often spelled pad Thai outside of Thailand), it was thought to have been invented as part of a contest as recently as the 1930s, and it includes more Chinese ingredients and techniques (noodles, tofu, wok frying) than it does Thai (tamarind, fish sauce). Even chili, perhaps the most emblematic of Thai ingredients, is originally from the Americas, having been introduced by Portuguese traders in the 16th century – a relative newcomer to the cuisine.

Simply put, Bangkok has long excelled at accepting new culinary elements and incorporating them almost flawlessly until both Thais and the outside world consider them “Thai.” It’s one of the city’s – and cuisine’s – greatest skills, and one that continues to this day, regardless of who’s ranking it.

Published on February 12, 2025