Guay Jub
(Pete fanning himself after hot innard soup, called Guay Jub: Chinatown, Bangkok)
He warned me only when the soup arrived that it would have a very peppery taste and that along with the humidity, we would be slowly melting in our clothes. You can possibly gather from this image that he was indeed correct and although not spicy, the soup was peppered to such a degree that we were just sweating from the minute we began eating.
The premise of the innards soup is that it contains the tasty bits found inside the animal. I found kidney, liver, intestines, heart and bladder in my bowl and enjoyed all of it, although I’m not a great fan of intestine because it’s often of an unpleasantly chewy consistency with little taste. This soup however contained the best I have ever had and I enjoyed everything. There was a new kind of noodle in the soup as well; it has the appearance of rolled up paper, as if a triangular slice of noodle dough has been rolled into a tube, thicker in the middle, a little like a stretched noodle croissant.
The concept of having Chinatown in Asia is still weird, somehow, but it is always an exciting place to go, wherever it is in the world. There were hundreds of Art Deco buildings in Bangkok’s Chinatown, their shiny, cheap facades winking in the dark. Just behind the soup stall is an ancient cinema, but I hear the inexpensive exterior poorly disguises the unsavoury nature of its films. What I love about Chinatown collectively is the bustle; the uncontrolled plethora of food and trinket stalls spilling out into the road, pedestrians dodging traffic, all the horn honking and shouting. It is a enchanting atmosphere, even this feels ancient, as if this rush of buying, selling, eating and drinking all together in the street has been continuing for centuries, right here.
