I was excited to go to the Village of Love, the historic Bangrak neighbourhood that is famous among Thais for its diverse local flavours. The word “bang” in Thai means village and “rak” means love .

The are many stories about how the name came to be. Our guide Thee said in his view it’s because there are diverse cultures living in one area. In any case, because of the name, the district is the most popular place to register marriages, especially on Valentine’s Day.

I took a tour with Taste of Thailand Food Tours http://www.tasteofthailandfoodtours.org/, which has consistent very high ratings from guests and critics, and now I know why. I add in my vote! If you’re in Bangkok, you must go!

I’m usually not a fan of the group tour style where there is a woman/man waving a flag so you know where she/he is in a big crowd but this tour is different and just what I love. It was intimate, interesting, very local with real food and people, and fun.

I loved that our guide Thee started the tour by teaching us two of the most important words to know in Thai on this tour… kapunka (thank you, for a woman) and aroika (good, for a woman).

We stopped at so many places..  street food with food carts, vendors in the wet market, small shops that have been running for generations, and local diners or hole in the walls we would call them back home, where we know the best food often comes from, and even a high-end restaurant.

The food tour told me to come on an empty stomach. I wasn’t sure about this advice because there is nothing worse than being in a food market and hungry, and I come from a family background that is food obsessed about what we are going to eat next, we eat quickly, and repeat. But this was good advice because there is ample food to try and you can buy more food along the way if you wish.

I liked our small group with a couple from Bavaria, Germany that came with a Thai-German translator, a couple from Chicago, a man from San Francisco, and me. So there was a mix of Thai, English, and German spoken in our small group while we walked in the market and shared food at different stops. That was fun in itself to talk about people’s experiences traveling through Asia and share our thoughts about the the food that we were eating. And it is the Thai way to eat communal family-style, an approach that I love as well to share good food with others.

Our lovely guide Thee was a fascinating part of the tour in itself.  In his young career he has been a pastry chef, monk, and is now a teacher full-time and guide part-time with Taste of Thailand Food Tours. I loved that he is passionate and knowledgeable about food and the city, and gentle and kind. The latter I feel is part of the Thai culture, which has a strong Buddhist thread, over 90%, and enables over 8.2 million to live relatively peacefully in one city together.

The tour started with one of Thee’s favourite street foods and now mine too. We stopped at a local street vendor, or hawker, for Khao Tom Mod, a banana leaf wrapped around sticky rice with taro or banana and grilled. A lovely combination of fragrant, sticky, warm, sweet and salty. Such care in a small package!

I loved going to the curry paste shop to see the mounds of different curry pastes being made. I know that each mound of paste contains a lot of ingredients and hard work. We used to make our version of Thai curry paste from scratch at the restaurant. This would be quite the ordeal that my cooks would whine about a bit as they had to chop, grate, roast, grind, and blend, a myriad of ingredients, including spice blends, galangal, lime zest, lemongrass, and Thai chilies. But they could not argue that the finished product that we would serve would be incredible, so fragrant, flavourful and rich, and the final say was from the customers that fell in love with it.

At the stop at a local fish cake vendor in the wet market there was a little boy from the family curiously eyeing us from around the corner as we ate our fish cakes with a sweet chili sauce. I wondered if he could carry on the family tradition or go on to do other things. As I get older, I look at children, wondering what kind of people they will become, what kind of world they will live in, and that I may not be around when they are older. I am not a parent, but I imagine this is what passes through your mind at times as one. I often look at older people too and wonder what they were like as young children, what were their hopes and dreams, and did their lives turn out as they had expected. Perhaps that is part of growing older, having this perspective.

The sweet stop was at Boonsap, a legendary store for Thai desserts, for a sampler plate of traditional Thai sweets. I love Thai desserts because they  often have the sweet and salty together. The salty taste can be a bit faint or it can be right in your face, like a little sweet crepe with cream and salted fish on top. Being more of a savoury than a sweet fan myself, I find myself reaching for more desserts here than back home, but they are small bites so ok, right?!

We paused at the long-established fruit market vendor where Thee spoke about local fruit. This is where he put his teaching background to good use. He explained to us the background of certain exotic fruit and we got to sample some of them, from fresh tamarind pods and mangosteens to rose and custard apples. It was an interesting and refreshing exercise that quenched my curiousity and daily need to eat a lot of fruit here, which is a must here because it is fresh, lush, delicious, inexpensive and it’s rehydrating with the high heat.

Thee took us through many narrow alley ways, ending up at a small non descript diner like so many you see from the street. How does one choose?! This one specializes in northern-type Thai cuisine. We had dishes for sharing, including green papaya salad (Som Thum) and spicy lemongrass salad (Yum Takuai). This was served with warm sticky rice in small woven containers.  We used our fingers (cleaned before) to break off some of the rice in the containers, roll it up in our hands, and dip it into the dish to soak up the flavour.

As a side note, I was surprised that Thais eat most dishes with a fork and spoon, and knives are not used to cut at the table. Things must be cut bite-sized before in the preparations. The spoon is held in the dominant hand, and the fork is held in the other, and you use the fork to push food into the spoon to eat. Apparently chopsticks are only used to eat Chinese noodle type dishes.

At the diner, I was surprised at how flavourful in your face the food was, and that’s the one that most struck me and stayed with me. The place, the food, the flavours and the company. It all came together in what now is a taste memory and hard to forget. That’s why it’s one of my favourites on the tour. It lingered as a taste not only in my palate but in my heart too, and that’s what good food does for you. It reaches your heart, and creates taste memories and longings for you to try it again, like a lover that you want more of.

Thee ended our tour with a stop at Than Ying Royal Cusine to sample Thai curry that is made for royalty and nobility. This was in stark contrast to the previous small local diner. We sat outside on a beautiful patio with a formal table setting with white tablecloth, silverware and servers like we were in NYC Union Square. This contrast I’m realizing is part of Bangkok, a city of contrasts. A shrine for praying beside a 7-11 that is open 24 hours, a group of monks in their orange robes getting their cell phones repaired at the busy MBK Centre, some of the best street food in world served in front of very popular large fast food chains.

The Village of Love is the perfect name for the Bangrak area filled with so much food, fresh and hand-made, passed down from generation to generation, and made with care and detail. For me, this is love in action and that’s why I feel food is love. We say, have you eaten, do you want me to get you something to eat, I’ll save you some leftovers for when you get home, let me take you out to eat to cheer you up, here’s what I made for you and I hope you like it. If that is not love, then what is?

Thank you Thailand Food Tours http://www.tasteofthailandfoodtours.org/, our guide Thee, all the vendors who crated our food with love, and my fellow diners who contributed to this amazing experience. Kapunka!