Steps from the center of Nang Leong Market, a seventy-year-old sundries shop. Kitchenware, shoes and sandals, buckets and mops, hardware, stationery... If you can't find it here, it probably doesn't exist.
'Why would I go to Carrefour or Tesco when a place like this is so close to my home?' our host said to us. Why indeed. 'We have to support our community first,' he added.
Khun Montri (above) inherited the shop from his grandmother. Though he welcomed the renovations to the market ('Better than before ... it was very dirty.') they haven't done anything to improve his own business, which he says has suffered terribly over the last ten years.
Nevertheless, he's hanging in: 'I'm going to try to take this shop to 100 years.'
Nang Leong is known for duck noodles. Sixty-five-year-old Khun Sia Pairat moved to the Nang Leong neighborhood fifty-nine years ago after a fire destroyed his family's home in Yaowarat (Bangkok's Chinatown). He started Sorroongroj duck noodle shop in this storefront (there's now an additional two, one right next door and one across the street) when he was twenty years old.
He devised the recipe himself, he says. We're no stranger to great duck noodles, but these just might be the best we've ever eaten. To make the rich, flavorful stock, he simmers duck carcasses with nineteen herbs and spices, such as cinnamon and star anise, for two hours. Whole ducks are added and cooked in the stock for an additional seventy-five minutes.
The broth is so dark it's almost black and each piece of duck meat is infused with the flavor and aroma of the herbs and spices. Plump, silky-skinned pork and shrimp dumplings are added to the bowl, along with chopped choy sum, cilantro leaves, plenty of crispy browned shallot, and a drizzle of garlic oil. These two bowls arrived as I was interviewing Khun Sia's son (below). Dave had finished taking photos and dug into his, while mine sat on the table next to me, close enough that curls of fragrant steam found their way to my nose. Torture! When I was finally able to dig in I almost moaned out loud. Darned fine duck noodles, and justifiably famous ones at that.
These days Khun Sia mostly takes a back seat to his son Montkon, who has big plans for Sorroongroj. He's expanded the menu - which he's had translated into English - beyond noodles to include Chinese standards such as steamed fish, extended opening hours beyond 3pm to 9pm, and is trying to standardize procedures in the kitchen. 'Whether my father cooks or not,' he says, 'everything should taste the same.' He's also enclosed the previously open kitchen because, he says, regular customers often bypassed the place if they didn't see his father manning the pots. 'We need to sell the brand,' he explains, 'not the individual cook.'
Khun Montkon is also pushing for Nang Leong Market to remain open at night, which he sees as the key to its survival. Other vendors are resisting. It's difficult to organize sellers, Montkon complains. 'If they have enough income to get by, they don't want to work longer or harder. There's no entrepreneurial spirit. To have enough is good enough.'
I had mixed feelings about Khun Montkon's ideas. I'm not sure most Bangkok residents would trip down to Nang Leong in the evening for Chinese-style steamed fish that they can get pretty much anywhere else (like Yaowarat). Sorroongroj offers one really unique item - stellar duck noodles - and I'm not sure expanding the menu to include abalone dishes is the key to success. But who am I to say?
Around the corner from Sorroongroj, back near the center of the market, is a shop called Yim Heng, which has been selling khao chae for over twenty years. Khao chae is most associated with the Thai New Year (Songkran) and March-April, the hottest months of naa roon, the hot-dry season. It comprises rice served in iced scented water accompanied by sweet-salty meats and fish.
It's a labor-intensive dish, which is probably why it's not all that easy to find in Bangkok (last time we visited Koh Kred you could get it there). The rice is cooked twice (the ultimate goal is perfectly white, individual grains) - first, until just al dente, after which it's rinsed and rubbed between the fingers to remove as much slippery starch as possible, and then once again until it's cooked through. The cooked grains are cleaned again, and then air-dried. Finally they're added to water that's been scented overnight with a fragrant cooking candle. After adding the rice to the scented water Yim Heng's proprietess scatters it with jasmine and rose petals.
Among the sweet-savories Yim Heng serves with its khao chae are luuk kapi (above, twelve o'clock), little balls made of dried and grilled fish mixed with shrimp paste, lime zest, lemongrass, and galangal, cooked in coconut cream and palm sugar and, finally, dipped in egg and deep-fried. There's also salted beef, shredded and fried with palm sugar (3 o'clock), and toothsome (and, yes, sweet) noodle-like egg strands (7 o'clock). Fresh vegetables are usually eaten alongside, though Yim Heng didn't have any on offer.
Khao chae is an acquired taste. Though I quite like - in small doses - the seemingly odd combination of palm sugar sweetness and fish/meat - the chilled, flower-scented rice is, well, strange. But it's uniquely Thai, something you should try at least once, preferably when you're faint from the heat and need something cool to revive you. One can't help but admire Yim Heng's owners for offering this laborious, old-fashioned dish year-round.
Lots of good luck above an old wooden shop house door
Perhaps the oldest shop at Nang Leong Market is Mae Som Jit, which occupies a corner shop kitty-corner to the market square. It opened 107 years ago, before the market did, and is now run by the third generation. Mae Som Jit makes and sells kanom (sweets), kanom, and more kanom. Among it's prettiest offerings is this coconut milk khao niao (sticky rice) six-pack,
which includes dainty sticky rice squares encased in banana leaf and topped with sweet shredded fish and dried shrimp, caramelized shallots, two different types of custard, and grated fresh coconut. Mae Som Jit's sweets are exquisite. They also sell khao maak - sticky rice fermented until slightly alcoholic and wrapped in a lotus leaf - and kanom tom, little balls made from red or white sticky rice flour that hide a surprise of palm sugar (similar to Malaysian onde-onde).
'Have you tried the beef noodles?' queried just about every single person we met at Nang Leong Market.
Nya Doon Nang Leong is a couple blocks down from the market square just past Chalerm Thani, the old wooden cinema. A bit out of range, so we didn't plan to include it in our story. But after so many enthusiastic recommendations from locals we had to give it a try. We started our last morning there, seated at one of the charming corner shop's wooden tables, swooning over big beefy bowls.
When we next head back to Nang Leong we'll hard pressed to decide whether to head first to Soorrongroj and duck noodles, or Nya Doon Nang Leong. The secret here, again, is long slow cooking, and a stock that includes cinammon, star anise, cardamom, and garlic. That, and 50+ years of experience. Nya Doon Nang Leong is just another of the neighborhood's 3rd generation-run shops.
You've a choice of noodles - we went with sen yai (wide rice noodles) - and they're softened not by a dip into boiling water, but into the bubbling cauldron of beef and beef parts from which the components of your bowl will be assembled. Very classy.
Our bowls held various cuts of falling-apart beef, melting tendon, big beef balls that actually tasted like meat (many are bouncy and that's about it), bean sprouts, stems of water spinach, and Chinese celery.
I'm a big fan of the chopped chilies in vinegar that grace just about every Thai noodle hut's tables, but I just couldn't bring myself to mar Nya Doon Nang Leong's masterpiece with extraneous flavors. Also popular here is beef rice - basically the meaty components of our bowls on a bed of rice with soup and veggies on the side. We may go that route next time. Or, better yet, one of each.
In short (if one can say that after two lengthy posts), Nang Leong Market and its surrounds are a glutton's goldmine, and the old neighborhood itself, with some interesting shops, is worth a wander. If you're staying up along Sukhumvit, Silom, or Sathorn getting here will be a bit of a challenge ... traffic is a nightmare (figure up to an hour in a cab, much of it spent at a standstill) and there's no train stop nearby. Nang Leong is within walking distance of Democracy Monument though, and worth the trek. Plan to come in the morning, and during the week - the market is quiet on Saturdays, dead on Sundays, and Nya Doon Nang Leong is closed on the weekends, as are Isaan food hotspot Benjarot and the curry rice shop we blogged earlier.
