A Taste of Ekkamai

I've been working on a video for The World of Street Food lately which has brought me to Bangkok's Ekkamai neighborhood to search for food at least once a week for several weeks.

Ekkamai is the area located in and around Soi Sukhumvit 63. It's a popular place to live, but more importantly, is home to some really great food.

The first restaurant I visited is one I've been wanting to try for years and years, ever since coming across an article about it on Atlas Obscura.

Wattana Panich is a small family-run restaurant that has been serving the same bowl of beef soup for over fifty years. And I do mean the same bowl of beef soup!

The restaurant's claim to fame is its huge cauldron of slow-simmered beef soup that has been kept at a continuous low boil for half a century.

Each day, the family adds fresh ingredients, new cuts of beef, and aromatic herbs to the pot, so that it is never fully emptied. Instead, it’s constantly replenished, creating a rich, intensely layered flavor built from decades of careful tending.

Since the soup is kept at a constant boil, it's perfectly safe to eat. In fact, this practice, known as "perpetual stew", dates back hundreds and hundreds of years as an early way of preserving food. At Wattana Panich, it's also a way to create a perfect soup that grows more and more flavorful by the year.

There is no recipe, the owner Nattapong Kaweenuntawong claims. Instead, he continuously tastes the soup, balancing its flavors with a secret blend of Chinese herbs to preserve the exact taste profile that his father created when he started the soup half a century ago.

 

I also visited Pralet Donuts, a Singaporean family-run cafe and bakery who recently opened a branch in Bangkok. Pralet is famous for their square-shaped sourdough donuts, each made using the family's signature 16-year-old sourdough starter which gives them their unique flavor and fluffy texture.

Pralet is known for their unique flavors, from their signature burnt butter honey donut to donuts flavored with coconut, matcha, and pistachio with raspberry.

The Bangkok branch also offers two unique Thai signature donuts; one topped with chicken floss and one with crispy fish. The combinations of savory toppings on sweet donuts sounds strange, but I was really curious and wanted to try one.

I ordered the "OG Catfish", a sourdough donut topped with crispy dried catfish, shrimp flakes, kaffir lime, and shio kombu (salted kelp) aioli and flavored with nam prik, or Thai chili paste. The donut itself wasn't overly sweet, which helped keep the flavors balanced.

To be honest, I very much preferred the sweet donut to the fishy one, but that might just be due to my Western palate and sweet tooth.

Here Hai is another Michelin Bib Gourmand restaurant in Ekkamai famous for their signature dish: "insane" crab fried rice served with lump meat from Thai blue swimmer crabs shipped in daily from Surat Thani Province in the south.

I ordered a small plate of fried rice, which was already huge! I can't imagine how big the XL sized portion would be. The rice itself was rich, savory, and smoky from being cooked in a wok over high heat, and the giant pieces of crab meat were tender, juicy, and sweet. The dish came with a side cup of Here Hai's special seafood sauce, a tangy, slightly spicy green sauce packed with flavor.

The rice was enough to fill me up, but I didn't want to come all the way out to Ekkamai without trying Here Hai's famous mantis shrimp as well.

Mantis shrimp are bizarre little sea creatures. They have the strongest striking power of any animal on Earth. Their punches can reach about 50 miles per hour, packing the power of roughly a .22 caliber bullet, and with 16 different color receptors in their eyes (as opposed to humans, who only have 3) they can see in a spectrum of colors invisible and unimaginable to humans.

It was my first time trying mantis shrimp. To me, they tasted more like lobster than any type of shrimp or prawn I've had before and had a more texture more like a slightly chewy fish. The meat was richer and sweeter than I expected, which was complemented really nicely by the garlic, pepper, and green onion the dish was prepared with.

Establish in 2019 by Bangkok-based food vlogger Mark Wiens, Phed Mark (a play on the phrase "phed maak", meaning "very spicy" in Thai, and on the name of the owner, Mark Wiens), serves just one dish: pad kaprao, or spicy basil stir fry.

Pad kaprao is easily my favorite Bangkok street food dish. It's a spicy, savory dish of minced meat (traditionally pork or chicken) stir fried in a smokey wok with hot Thai chilies and handfuls of peppery holy basil and served over rice.

The kaprao at Phed Mark isn't your typical street food fare. The restaurant uses high-quality ingredients cooked over high heat in an oiled wok to impart it with a unique wok hei smokiness that you won't typically find in other plates of kaprao, and each plate of kaprao is topped with duck eggs which have a richer yolky flavor than the traditional duck eggs.

I was tempted to try the Level 5 spicy pad paprao, but decided to go for Level 3. I'm glad I did. The medium-level spice was perfect for me. Mark Weins is known for his love of extremely spicy food (his catchphrase is "If it's not spicy, I'm not eating", so the level of spice here is definitely scaled up a little bit.

And speaking of Mark Weins, he's also recently opened a second restaurant nearby, this one a trendy shophouse-style restaurant specializing in Padthai.

Thep Padthai takes the famous Thai street food dish and bumps it up with big portions, juicy prawns, and lots of spice. Instead of the traditional flat noodles, the padthai here is served with thin noodles that really hold the flavors. The padthai was also served with tiny crispy dried shrimp for extra umami flavors, chili, lime, and green onion, and was topped with two fried eggs.

Padthai isn't my very favorite Thai dish, but I really enjoyed this one. It's a little expensive for what should be a street food lunch, but the portion was big, and the novelty of eating at a famous vlogger's restaurant made up for it.

Of course, this is just barely scratching the surface of everything that Ekkamai has to offer. Unlike many Bangkok-based expats, I rarely make my way to Sukhumvit Road. I find it too crowded, expensive, and too packed with foreigners for my liking. However, I have to admit, there's a lot to discover, and maybe I need to start being more open-minded about discovering a side of the city that I've really overlooked for the past decade.