Tip · Buy from the stall that is cooking, not the one with a tray of finished food. Point at what you want and say "nueng chut" (one set). Most snacks are 20 to 40 baht.
Most visitors eat pad thai, green curry and mango sticky rice for two weeks and go home thinking they've had Thai food. The stuff Thais actually eat between meals is sitting on carts they walked past every day, and nobody stopped because there was no English sign and no obvious way to order.
This page is a running list of that food. One snack at a time, with what it is, what it should cost, where you'll find it and the few words that get it into your hands. It grows as I add to it. The first entry is khanom krok, because it's cheap, it's everywhere, and it's the one I'd send a first-timer to before anything else.
How buying from a cart works
The whole process is pointing. Walk up, point at what you want, hold up fingers for how many. Nobody expects you to speak Thai and nobody minds that you don't. If you want to try, "ao an nee" (I'll take this one) and "nueng chut" (one set) or "nueng thung" (one bag) cover almost everything on this page.
Pay in cash, small notes. A 1,000 baht note for a 25 baht snack is a small nuisance for the vendor and they'll sometimes have to go and find change. Twenties, fifties and coins are what you want in your pocket.
One rule matters more than the rest, and it applies to everything below: buy from the stall that is cooking, not the one with a tray of finished food sitting in the sun. Cooked-to-order food in Thailand is safe and good. The same food that's been sitting for two hours is neither. If a cart has a queue of Thais and the pan is going, that's the one.
Timing is the other thing people get wrong. Street food runs on two shifts, roughly 6 to 9 in the morning and again from about 4pm until the vendor sells out. The middle of the day is dead. Morning is when you'll see most of the sweet snacks, sold to people on the way to work and to kids on the way to school.
Khanom krok (ขนมครก)
Khanom krok, plain and pandan. Photo by Takeaway, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Khanom krok are small coconut pancakes, crisp at the edge and soft in the middle, cooked in a heavy cast-iron pan with round dimples in it. "Krok" is the Thai word for mortar, which is what the dimples look like. It's pronounced roughly "ka-nom krok", with krok rhyming with clock.
There are two batters and that's what makes them. The first, rice flour and coconut milk with a little salt, goes into the hot dimple and starts to set with a crisp bottom. Then a spoon of thick, sweet coconut cream goes on top and cooks into a custard. The finished thing is half crunchy, half soft, sweet and slightly salty at the same time. A few strands of spring onion on top is the classic version. Corn, taro and pumpkin are the common variants, and you'll sometimes see a green pandan batter.
They're sold in a set, usually eight to ten pieces, either as open halves or stuck together in pairs. A set runs 20 to 40 baht depending on where you are. Anything above that is a tourist price. The vendor will scoop them out of the pan, drop them into a paper cup or a folded banana leaf, and hand them over hot. Eat them within a few minutes. The crisp rim goes soft fast, and khanom krok that have been sitting are a different, worse snack.
You'll find them at morning markets, outside BTS and MRT stations from about 6:30am, and at the local evening markets from late afternoon. Most of the carts are a woman with one pan on a gas ring, and she'll be doing one set at a time as people arrive. If you see a pan with the two batters going, stop. If you see a tray of finished khanom krok sitting under cling film at a tourist night market, keep walking.
Ordering is one line. "Khanom krok nueng chut" gets you one set. If they ask something back, they're asking whether you want the spring onion ("ton hom") or which topping. Nodding gets you the default, which is the one you want the first time anyway.
Don't confuse them with khanom buang, the crisp taco-shaped crepes with meringue in them, or khanom Tokyo, the small rolled pancakes with a sausage inside. All three show up on the same streets. Khanom krok is the round one from the dimpled pan, and in my opinion the best of the three.
Moo ping (หมูปิ้ง)
Moo ping is grilled pork on a stick, and with a small bag of sticky rice it's the breakfast a lot of Thais buy on the way to work. The pork sits overnight in a paste of garlic, coriander root and white pepper with soy or fish sauce and palm sugar, and many vendors add coconut milk. It goes over charcoal and gets brushed as it cooks, so the marinade caramelises on the outside and the fat at the edges crisps up. You eat it with your hands, a bite of pork and a pinch of rice.
The carts run on the morning shift, roughly 6 to 9am, by bus stops, office streets, morning markets and school gates, and some come back from about 4pm. You'll usually smell the charcoal before you see the cart. The usual rule applies: buy from the cart where the skewers are on the grill, not the pile that's been sitting since six. If you're staying in Silom, the Soi 5 morning market is a good place to start on a weekday.
To order, say "moo ping saam mai, khao niao nueng thung". That's three skewers and one bag of sticky rice, the standard breakfast. Mai (ไม้) is the word for the stick. In Bangkok a skewer is usually 10 to 13 baht and the rice is 5, so it comes to about 40 baht. Delivery apps add a few baht on top. Most carts grill chicken (gai ping) and liver (tap ping) on the same fire.
There are two styles, and it's worth knowing which one you're buying. Moo ping boran (โบราณ, old-style) is chunks of pork, often with a piece of fat on the end of the stick, and a bit saltier. Moo ping nom sod (นมสด, fresh milk) is minced pork marinated in milk, sweeter and softer, and the skewers look smooth and even because they're often bought in ready-made from a wholesaler. The boran label only exists because the milk version took over. I'd go for boran, mostly because it's more likely to be the vendor's own marinade. If the sign says โบราณ, or the pieces on the grill look uneven, that's the one. Don't mix either of them up with moo satay, the thin skewers served with peanut sauce and cucumber relish, or kor moo yang, grilled pork neck sliced onto a plate.
A well-known boran cart is Lung Uan (หมูปิ้งลุงอ้วน), the late-night Silom stall that older guides still send people to. It has moved. It now sells from Soi Rong Than, a lane off Suan Phlu Road behind Suan Phlu market in Sathorn, and it's open from about 6am to 10pm.
The made-to-order shop (aahaan taam sang)
Not everything on this page comes off a cart. The next two dishes mostly come from the aahaan taam sang shop (อาหารตามสั่ง, literally "food made to order"), which is the most common kind of eating place in Thailand and the one visitors walk past because it doesn't look like anything. It's an open-front shop or a corner under a tin roof, a wok on a gas ring, a glass cabinet of raw meat and vegetables on ice, plastic stools, and a laminated menu of fifty stir-fries, fried rices and noodle dishes at roughly 50 to 70 baht a plate. Every neighbourhood has a few. This is where Thais eat lunch.
The word to know is "rad khao" (over rice). Almost every stir-fry on the menu can be served on its own with rice, or over a plate of rice as a one-plate meal, and rad khao is the cheaper, faster version. "Pi-set" (special) gets you a bigger portion for 10 to 20 baht more. A fried egg on top is "kai dao". Spice is "pet noi" for a little, "mai pet" for none. The shops are busiest at lunch, when the grilled-meat and sweet carts have thinned out, so if it's 1pm and you're hungry this is the answer.
Pad see ew (ผัดซีอิ๊ว)
Pad see ew at a canteen in Bangkok. Photo by Vee Satayamas, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Pad see ew is wide flat rice noodles (sen yai) fried hard in a wok with dark soy sauce, egg, Chinese broccoli and thin slices of pork or chicken. The name gives it away: see ew (ซีอิ๊ว) is just the Thai word for soy sauce, borrowed from Teochew Chinese, so the dish is literally "fried with soy sauce". It's sweet and smoky from the soy caramelising against the wok, and not spicy at all. If you like pad thai but find it a bit sugary, this is the one to move to.
You'll find it in two places. The first is its own cart, usually signed ผัดไทย ผัดซีอิ๊ว ราดหน้า (pad thai, pad see ew, rad na), which you'll recognise by the tray of white noodles and the pile of Chinese broccoli next to the wok. The second is any taam sang shop, where it's on every menu. It is not a night market snack, and the tourist night markets mostly don't sell it.
Ordering is "pad see ew moo" (pork) or "pad see ew gai" (chicken). It comes with white pepper on top and nothing else, and the local move is to spoon chilli vinegar (prik nam som) from the condiment caddy over it, which cuts the sweetness. A plate is 40 to 60 baht from a cart, 50 to 70 at a shop.
Pad kee mao (ผัดขี้เมา)
Pad kee mao, wide-noodle version. Photo by Takeaway, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Pad kee mao is pad see ew's hot cousin: the same wide noodles, fried with a lot of chilli, garlic, holy basil, fresh green peppercorns and fingerroot (krachai), plus whatever meat you pick. It's savoury and sharp rather than sweet, which is the main way it differs from the "drunken noodles" served in Thai restaurants abroad, where the sauce is usually sweetened for the room. The version in Thailand is meant to be hot. Order it "pet noi" the first time.
The name means "drunkard's stir-fry". Kee mao (ขี้เมา) is a drunkard, and there's no alcohol in the dish. The usual explanation is that it started as food to eat with a bottle of whisky, or the thing you fry up from whatever is in the fridge when you get home late. Nobody knows for sure. (ขี้ on its own is the word for poo. In front of another word it means "prone to", as in ขี้อาย, shy, or ขี้เกียจ, lazy. The Commons caption on the photo above translates the name as "stir-fried shit drunk", which is wrong but not by much.)
This is a taam sang dish. Say "pad kee mao moo, sen yai" for the wide-noodle version, or "pad kee mao moo rad khao" for the same stir-fry over rice, which is how a lot of Thais order it and in my opinion the better plate. You'll also see "sapaketti pad kee mao", the same thing with spaghetti, which sounds like a joke and isn't. A plate is 50 to 70 baht, more for seafood ("talay").
Related reading
The night markets in Bangkok are where you'll see the widest spread of this food in one place. The Bangkok night markets guide covers which ones are still worth going to and when to arrive so the good stalls haven't sold out. If you're eating meat-free, the vegetarian phrases guide has the two words that matter at any stall. Khanom krok is usually fine, but ask about the fish sauce on anything savoury.