For this dinner, I wanted to cook the Thai food I actually grew up with. The type of family meal where a spread of dishes is shared amongst all and built around balance rather than excess.
Growing up, my grandfather and step-grandmother lived half the year in Thailand and the other half here in ATL. Since retiring, they have lived full-time in Thailand. Some of my earliest memories were of me bewildered by all the dishes she would make in the kitchen; the intensely herbal, spicy, deeply layered regional dishes which seemed only she knew. The type of food you cannot find in any restaurant but constantly crave.
This menu will draw from both memory and the seasonality of GA produce, combining traditional influences with local produce. Expect a dinner centered around texture, aroma, spice, and unapologetically alive! The type of communal eating I came to love through family!
Spring - Summer 2019: Thailand
Bangkok
Bangkok does not care about your sense of order.
Car lanes feel more like sensory noise than actual rules, swallowed whole by 17 million people all trying to get somewhere at once. The city moves in every direction, all at the same time. At first, it feels overwhelming. Then, somehow, it starts making perfect sense.
And honestly, I kind of love it for that.
There’s beauty buried inside the chaos here. Golden temples tucked between tangled power lines. Tiny plastic stools serving food better than restaurants charging ten times the price. Floating markets at sunrise. The King’s Palace glowed in the heat. Smoke from grilled pork skewers mixes with humidity thick enough to wear.
Bangkok can feed you the best meal of your life at 1 a.m. from someone cooking over a rusted cart on the side of the road. It can also absolutely humble your stomach a few hours later. That’s part of the deal.
But more than anything, I remember the people. Thailand is called the Land of Smiles for a reason. Even in a city moving at full speed, there’s warmth everywhere if you slow down enough to notice it.
Kantharawichai / Khon Kaen
The first time I visited my grandparents’ village outside Khon Kaen, I spent eight hours on a bus, staring out the window, thinking: Did I accidentally get kidnapped?
Rice fields stretched forever in every direction. Small roadside shops. Water buffalo. The occasional motorbike carrying an entire family is somehow balanced on it, and the youngest is the one driving. Hours passed without seeing much of anything besides farmland and open sky.
This part of Thailand feels very far away from the version most tourists know.
Life moves more slowly here. The heat hangs heavier. Days revolve around farming, family, and food. The people visiting are usually scholars studying the region’s history or Thai pilgrims coming to see the Sacred Twins Buddha statues and ancient sandstone carvings that have stood here for over a thousand years.
What I remember most, though, is the rhythm of daily life. Eating outside while frogs from the frog farm croaked. Markets 2x a day with the freshest produce, meat that had been butchered 30minutes prior, and flies everywhere that each vendor fought to keep away, but to no avail. To be honest, I still believe that meat/ produce is 10x cleaner than the average produce we can get at a supermarket in the US. Everyone knows everybody. No rush to be anywhere else.
It’s quiet in a way that makes you realize how loud the rest of the world is.
Phuket
While studying abroad in Hong Kong, I went to Thailand three separate times. One trip was to visit family. The other two were to Phuket with friends.
Which means, naturally, we made a lot of terrible decisions.
Phuket is one of those places where the jungle crashes directly into the ocean. In a single day, you can island hop, snorkel, scuba dive, visit elephant sanctuaries, eat some of the best seafood of your life, and then somehow end up drinking with strangers on a beach until sunrise.
As college students, we accomplish all of that at once, every single day.
One night, instead of sleeping before our 6 a.m. elephant sanctuary tour, we stayed out bar hopping, made friends with bartenders, and ended up drinking with them on the beach until it was time to leave for the excursion. Another night, one of my friends wiped out on a moped after having a little too much to drink prior. Luckily, a local helped get her to a hospital while the rest of us spent hours trying to figure out where she had disappeared to without any phones on us. Somehow, we eventually found her — stitched up, medicated, and with a hospital bill that cost less than dinner back home.
The highlight, though, was probably getting chased by stray dogs on a late-night motorbike ride through back roads with one of my friends, trying not to crash while laughing hysterically the entire time, only to accidentally stumble across one of the most beautiful empty beaches I’ve ever seen.
That’s what I remember most about Thailand.
Not just the food or the scenery, but the unpredictability of it all. The feeling that every day could turn into a story.
