If you travel to Bangkok then having weird street food on Khao San Road is a must.
There’s an awful lot to do when you go to Bangkok, from Ping Ponging ladies to fake, and, or real tattoos, and then there is Khao San Road. I’ve written about visiting Khao San Road in 2020, but with the current crisis who knows when the hell that is likely to happen. Coronavirus rant over.
The Khao San Road has been a backpacker mecca for a long time, and pretty much has whatever you are looking for is here, both legal and illegal. Bars, clubs, massage, hippie crack, and big buckets of cheap nasty booze!
It also has some of the most infamous street food in Asia, some of it good, and some of it even quite dangerous – read my Sausagegate blog here. It also has a whole heap of weirdness, weirdness in the shape of bugs, scorpions, and even the larvae of the caterpillar!
I’m not going to lie I have tried all of this crap at some point in my life, (after all I have lived in China for almost 14 years), but that was all before my Street Food Guy alter-ego had been born, so larvae and the scorpion was to get another try.
I’ll start with larvae, you are told it tastes like egg yolk, and it has a similar kind of texture, but is in fact just putrid. Hard to define the taste in a lot of ways.
Then there’s scorpion, sold in weird markets the world over, and definitely a money-spinner for the street food vendors of Khao San Road. Again no point beating around the bush on this one!
Scorpion has no meat inside, you are basically eating a shell, a shell covered in sauce. To me the sauce tastes like marmite. You either love, or hate marmite. I hate marmite and scorpion.
So weirdness out of the way there’s also a whole heap of “normal” Kha San Road street food, with great BBQ meats, and cheap enough back-alley restaurants selling good Thai curries or Thai fried noodles.
The Khao San Road might have a reputation for being tacky, but there’s street food, you won’t go hungry, or indeed lonely on the Khao San Road.