The Winner: The House of Kuang Seafood

Sometimes you get lucky when you travel, and sometimes you don’t.

For our first night in Bangkok we asked the hotel for a suggestion of a simple Thai restaurant within short walking distance from the hotel (after all, we’d been travelling for two days!).  Sadly, it was a disaster, food wise and comfort wise (was that a rat we saw?).  But, it WAS close and it was very, very low cost!

But — the next day we got lucky — really lucky.  So lucky that we returned to Kuang Seafood Restaurant three times.  Kuang  is a restaurant for locals.  We knew it must be good – in our three visits we were always the only foreigners. It was a brisk ten minute stroll from the hotel — the walk an adventure in itself — filled with food carts and stalls, tables of the street, massage and reflexology houses, and lots of hustle and bustle.

We were with our friend Maxime Buyckx of The Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness, who had lived for a year in Thailand working for the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, knows Thai food well, and still speaks a little of the language (not easy!). Also joining us were John Foreyt of Baylor College of Medicine and Adam Drewnowski of the University of Washington.

This is where I started my search for the best Tom Yum.   Maxime ordered it on our first visit, and it was so good, we ordered it each and every time we went.  (Maxime confessed that he’d eaten Tom Yum every day for three months when he first moved to Bangkok.)  We also tried pad thai, squid, one other fish and lots of Singha beer.

After our first visit, the owners and the wait staff knew us, remembered what we ate, and made us feel like locals.  I suppose you could say it’s almost like Cheers (we ARE from Boston).  Kuang  is the neighborhood restaurant where everyone knows your name!  And, from our sampling, it has THE best Tom Yum in town.

We’re already thinking about our next visit……

Sara