When I first came to Bangkok in 1993, I stayed in a simple hotel near Khaosan Road. I bought my first lunch from a small street stall right on the pavement.

It was simple, it was cheap and it tasted wonderful.

Back then, Bangkok had neither a Skytrain nor a subway.

People usually stayed in the neighborhood where they were staying.

Back then, street food wasn’t concentrated in particular tourist streets. You could find it anywhere people worked.

This was the food people in Thailand picked up during their lunch break or on their way to work. Most stalls had their own specialty, often based on an old family recipe.

One cart served noodle soup, while at the next, pork skewers known as Moo Ping were grilled over charcoal.

I was rarely disappointed back then, because these vendors had to be good or their regular customers would simply stop coming. That’s why, to this day, I look for stalls where mostly locals or staff from the nearby office towers eat.

They’re usually right there.

A classic for me is the side streets off Silom Road near the office towers.

The kind of street food we know in Bangkok today has only been around since the 1950s. Before that, people mostly cooked at home, and many still worked close to where they lived.

Then Bangkok grew explosively. Jobs sprang up in the city center, while homes were increasingly farther away. People needed fast, good, affordable food right at work.

At first, Chinese dishes dominated. Many vendors came from Yaowarat, the old Chinatown.

A classic is “Khao Man Gai”: rice with tender poached chicken breast or thigh. It’s still one of my favorite dishes.

Over time, more and more classic Thai dishes were added. Fried rice, boat noodle soup, curries, and, of course, little bowls of spicy nam prik sauce, a staple at many street food stalls.

With the boom in tourism to Thailand, street food also became increasingly important to visitors. Today, it is an essential part of the Bangkok experience for many.

Pad Thai, satay skewers with peanut sauce, mango sticky rice.

All of this found its way into the city's street food stalls, which catered to locals as well as tourists. Street food remains an important part of everyday life to this day.

Street food here isn’t just folklore; it’s a source of food, a part of the culture and an economic force all at once. But its popularity also brought problems. Street food stalls suddenly sprang up everywhere that large numbers of people passed by.

Some sidewalks were completely blocked. I still remember the area around Siam Square well. Tables and chairs were set up so close together that pedestrians often had to step into the road.

In 2016, the city administration stepped in. Many sidewalks were cleared, and numerous vending areas disappeared. Thousands of vendors were affected.

 Since then, street food has become more concentrated in certain areas, such as Yaowarat Road in Chinatown and the area around Khaosan Road.

But it hasn’t disappeared from the other neighborhoods either. It’s simply too important for that. In the small side streets around Sukhumvit Road, food stalls sometimes appear at lunchtime for a few hours, seemingly out of nowhere. And in the evenings, they set up outside closed storefronts. Today, Bangkok has many faces of street food: the classic street stalls, the food stalls in the side streets, the famous areas in Chinatown, and now the food courts in the big shopping malls. My personal favorite is the food court in the basement of Siam Paragon. There you’ll find some of the city’s best vendors all in one place: cool, clean, and comfortable.

The latest development is the introduction of so-called hawker centres, modelled on those in Singapore. These are covered market areas with lots of stalls, which are set to open early in the morning.

The first of these centers is at Entrance 5 to Lumphini Park.

More to come.

My final tip: don’t just look for the most famous stall. See where the locals eat, where service is quick, where there’s plenty cooking, and where the aroma draws you in from afar.

Give it a try.