EATING IN THE REAL BANGKOK

There are two Bangkoks in Thailand, two contradictory cities existing side by side. The Bangkok of tourists is all smiles and flowers, a gracious city hugging the curves of the Chao Praya River. To eat dinner in this city of dreams, you board a ferry boat and float across to waterside restaurants where beautiful women serve exotic tropical drinks.

Meanwhile, in the other Bangkok, where the river is nothing but a nuisance causing endless floods that stall cars and snarl the traffic into even worse tangles than before, life moves to a different beat. The floating market of the tourists may be a quaint and pretty place, but the markets of the other Bangkok are huge, noisy, exuberant affairs. In tourist Bangkok, there are long leisurely meals, but in the other Bangkok the eating never stops. The Thais do not so much eat meals as live a life punctuated by snacks, and every street is sprinkled with dozens of stalls selling deliciously fragrant food.

If tourists are isolated from the real Bangkok, it is because the Thais are convinced that travelers prefer it this way. “Take our food,” explains a Thai. “It is not only that tourists find it too hot, (which they often do), but that they do not understand how to eat it. In Western food, everything has fixed flavors, but when we sit down to eat, we make the food to our own taste.”

In the real Bangkok the humblest noodle stand is equipped with bowls of chiles, jars of pickled garlic, soy sauce, fish sauce and finely ground peanuts for customers to use at will. No matter how inexpensive the restaurant, each meal is accompanied by trays of vegetables and heaps of fresh herbs. You see the Thais at table, intent upon secret harmonies known only to themselves. The Thais eat with great joy and great seriousness, savoring each bite that goes into their mouths.

The one place where the Bangkok of tourists and the real Bangkok overlap is the International Seafood Market. The restaurant is actually a supermarket filled with raw ingredients; a battalion of chefs stand at the front waiting for the customers to tell them what to do. In these long aisles of food every fish, every herb and every vegetable is clearly labeled in both Thai and English, and every price is marked by the kilogram. You grab a shopping cart, and as you wheel it around, you find your fellow diners making suggestions as they compose their own meals. You walk past shrimp that range from pretty big to enormous, past five kinds of lobster, past more fish than you have ever seen before in one place.

The variety of fish and shellfish to be found in Thailand is truly astonishing, and you find it all here--pomfret, bubble fish, mussels, clams, cockles, oysters--as well as an extraordinary array of crabs, from the giant claws that the Thais invariably eat in a rather mild curry sauce to the “swamp crab” filled with roe and best eaten simply grilled.

(These are also small blue crabs, but you’d do better to wait and taste them at a restaurant called Nguen Lee, which is famous for its Pu Dong-- raw crabs doused with an incendiary chile sauce. The crabs spend five hours marinating in a salt-and-vinegar brine that softens the shell. Late in the evening the restaurant is filled with men drinking fragrant rice whiskey and chewing on the sweet translucent bits of crabs. The roe--soft, bright red and very delicate--gives the dish a rakish air and a unique flavor that tastes like nothing else on earth.)

Having come to the end of the fish aisle, you are faced with the problem of selecting vegetables. There are stubby straw mushrooms, their texture like marrow, delicious when stir-fried with the fragile little stalks of asparagus and the sweet crunchy miniature ears of corn. There is infant celery, wonderful baby sugar peas, vibrant tomatoes, and tiny green beans that are absolutely seductive. There is also a green which is used all over Thailand for a dish called “morning glory on fire.” The green is quickly stir fried with garlic and chiles and soy sauce and then a dollop of oil and water is tossed in so that the fire leaps into the pan and sears the vegetables. It is a fabulous show.

When you’ve selected your food it is time to head for the check-out counter. The line snakes through the tables as people have their purchases weighed and tallied. (The cash register total is but the first of two charges; at the end of the meal another bill, for the cooking, will be brought to your table.)

Now comes the most difficult moment of the meal, when you have to make the final decisions about what to do with all this food. The Thais enjoy this process enormously, and as you stand there mentally reviewing flavors and considering how your food should best be cooked, you are finally becoming a part of the real Bangkok. If you stay in tourist Bangkok, you will certainly be well-fed, but it is a passive experience quite unlike the rollicking delicious joy of eating crab with your fingers and tasting lime on your lips and thinking how fine it is to be alive.

International Seafood Market and Restaurant, 388 Sukhumvit Road, opposite Soi Asoke, Bangkok, 391-6256, open for lunch and dinner every day; American Express, Diners Club, Visa .

Nguen Lee Restaurant, 101/25-26 Soi Lung Suan, Bangkok, 251-8366, open for lunch and until 3 a.m. every day. No credit cards .