So, let’s get down to the treats from Thailand, or how we got our first taste of Asian cuisine. Since we stayed at the Pattaya Park hotel, which is at the bottom of the “Russian street” in Pattaya, most of our culinary explorations took place there. But first things first.
We won’t dwell on breakfasts: they have already been described in the article about the hotel.
We had lunch either on the “Russian street”, at the big “Central Festival” shopping centre, or on excursions. At lunchtime we mostly had snacks to tide us over until the main part of our gastro tour — dinner. In various street cafés or at the mall we had salads, tom yum soup, breaded prawns as a starter, and fruit. As you know, treats from Thailand mean an abundance of fruit and seafood. So we didn’t deny ourselves buying loads of fruit that was exotic for us, seafood, fish, and everything that is sold at sky-high prices back home.
Dinner. This is where we ate everything, everywhere. At the little “Russian market” we stocked up on fruit and fruit shakes. We also really liked salt-crusted fish. But you need to make sure they cook a fresh fish, not one that has been lying there warming up for several hours. At the same market we tried various seafood, sausages, shawarma from a machine, and even grilled frog (we didn’t like it: it was very overdried and overcooked, no spices at all — generally not very tasty). Along the “Russian street” we went into various cafés and had prawns in batter (we loved them), tom yum soup with seafood, papaya salad and rice in a pineapple. At the “Central Festival” mall we also tried various cafés and visited an all-you-can-eat restaurant. You get 1.5 hours and a choice of menus (small, medium and large, with the price changing accordingly), and you can order as many ingredients from that menu as you like. But there’s one BUT. If, after you’ve eaten and are about to leave, there’s anything uneaten left, you pay three times as much for it by weight. So don’t take too much at once — take a little at a time and gauge your strength. And yes, in this restaurant you cook the food yourself on a hob built into your table (the large menu, which we took, includes crabs, which the Thai staff cook). And by tradition we also visited McDonald’s. Expensive.
Food on excursions. It varied: for example, on the excursion to Bangkok we were taken to a swanky hotel and led into the hotel restaurant (84th floor) with a buffet. The choice was quite large, but the quality of the food was an acquired taste. On the island-hopping yacht excursion, meals were served right on the yacht, with a very limited choice. On another yacht excursion there was unlimited alcohol, but the yacht looked more like a shed. On some excursions there was no food at all. On the 2-day excursion to the River Kwai there was a modest dinner without drinks; everything else could be bought separately. On another excursion we visited an oyster farm, where we tasted fresh oysters, and we also visited a pineapple plantation and tried different varieties of pineapple. On the zoo excursion, after the crocodile show, we had lunch at a buffet café that served several different crocodile dishes — but honestly, we didn’t really like them, too much gristle.
Alcohol in shops (the same goes for cafés, although they’ll pour you one under the counter outside these hours) is only sold at set times — if I remember correctly, from 11:00 to 23:00. Alcohol: the very tasty “SangSom” rum — delicious, and the next day there’s no sign of a hangover (well, if you drank within reason in the evening…).
I was really struck by people who had come from the CIS countries and ran in crowds to cafés serving pelmeni, borscht, cutlets and the like — things everyone has at home, in their own country. I don’t understand the point: paying three times as much for something you can eat at home any time of year, instead of eating what you can’t find back home at all, or only at a high price and poor quality. Well, that’s just my musings, although deep down I realise I’m judging such people.
Those were our treats from Thailand.
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