The one about the food
Okay I’ve been promising this post since the beginning and I’m finally settling down to do it.
A good part of the reason we chose this hotel again was for the breakfast spread. Thing we learned in general on last year’s trip: in Thailand there’s very few things that are considered just breakfast foods. Despite it being morning time, basically any food is on the table as a breakfast option. It’s our western culture that tells us eggs, sweet rolls, cured meats, and cereals are standard breakfast fare. I’ve never been a huge fan of limiting myself to just traditional breakfast foods, and throughout my life whenever that ice-breaker question of what did you have for breakfast comes up (and in my line of work it comes up a lot), people always chuckle at whatever it is I say because it stands outside their imagination of what a good breakfast looks like.
So let me tell you about everything I love about our breakfast options at our hotel:
There’s so many fresh fruits and vegetables available. I love that there’s a decent salad bar every morning that includes a few different mixes of lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, and a few other options that seem to rotate by the day.
Meat and cheese. Adam and I have always been fans of meats and cheeses in the morning as they really cover that protein base to get us nourished for the day — here there are multiple options of meats and cheeses on the regular
Asian staple foods. There’s always multiple rice cookers filled with rice cooked a few ways. There's stir fry, sautéed vegetables, and a Thai standard of boiled rice soup (Khao Tom) both with and without meat, complete with a wide selection of toppings. Then there’s a section that rotates between having Korean and Japanese standards like tteokbokki and miso soup.
There’s still plenty of bread because the western tourists love their carbs. Just check out the photo below.
There’s a made to order egg station…again because westerners like what they like
Every day there’s a different Thai special food, which has been a great way to try new things without the pressure of having to translate from a menu
Drink stations. The place has several stops for whatever you might need to drink including Thai iced tea, a traditional tea station with a variety of options, espresso machines, and a juice and water station. All of these are short enough to be independently accessed by kids.
So this is how we get to start our day every day! Adam and I tend to eat enough for the full day, thus making us able to mostly skip lunch and eat a light dinner. Our kid is such a grazer that most days she eats like 5 bites of food then proclaims she’s full. If we sit there long enough though she’ll lean in and graze her way though the place.
So that’s just breakfast. Another food highlight of this trip was the night we had Korean BBQ. It felt odd to have Korean food in Thailand, but with Korean Town being so close to our hotel and needing to limit our walking on this day, we went for it. Korean BBQ is always a feast, then we added some kimbap and Miriam got some Korean noodle soup.
That beautiful Korean BBQ spread. Can you spot the fried squid in there?
Yesterday (December 28th) we actually broke our own rule and took two big outings. The first was to Benchakitti Park, then the second was to Yaowarat Road, which is the street food center of Chinatown. We had read SO MUCH about the street food scene there, and we didn’t make it out during street food hours last year, so we figured this year was our year to go. Honestly, between having a 5 year old and a guy with mobility issues it ended up being really overwhelming, but we DID get to taste a few incredible foods.
Chinese hot and sour soup and dumplings are Miriam’s love language, so the mission for the day was to find some dumplings and soup. We tried to explain to her over and over again that the likelihood of finding them as she knew them was quite slim, and that she would need to expand her imagination of what those things could be like. Things we tried:
Shrimp donuts
Fried dumplings
Rolled rice noodle soup(Guay Jub) - this soup was actually from a Michelin Bib Gourmand stand (Ouan Pochana), which means it was Michelin rated at a regular human’s budget…a pretty high honor!
Pomegranate juice
Passion fruit juice
Grape Smoothie
Though we did see a cart of fried insects, none of us were up for sampling.
Some may be wondering how Miriam is doing with trying all the new things. I give her a 6 out of 10 on that. Though she is quick to turn her nose to most new things, we generally have her take at least 2 bites. There are some foods here that admittedly smell funny because of the wide use of fish sauce in Thai food, but once she’s able to get past the smell she’s open to trying. There have been a small handful of things she truly didn’t like, but she has still been able to find more than enough to eat, and we are lucky to still have so many fresh fruits and vegetables around.
Yesterday we actually broke our own rule and took two outings. Before going to Chinatown, we took some time to visit Benchakitti Park, which is just behind our hotel. It’s a beautiful space in the heart of the city the has both a regular park (complete with pond and water monitor lizards), and a forest park. Within the forest park there’s an incredible playground which we learned was built just in the last year. While there, Miriam found some Thai friends that spoke English with near perfect American accents and they played HARD. Here’s a little video tour of the playground that I had shared on TikTok, but since that’s going away soon I also put it on YouTube.
