← All articles · Thailand · 8 May 2016

Pattaya, Thailand: Breakfast in the fresh market, chillies, ginger and coconut pancakes

An early morning in the fresh market in May 2016: baskets of bird's eye chillies, wholesale ginger and shallots, buckets of cut flowers, and kanom krok off a cart.

Our last morning in Thailand, 8 May 2016, started at twenty past eight in a covered fresh market. That's late by market standards and early by ours. The lanes were still wet, the flower sellers were already halfway through their working day, and breakfast turned out to be sold off the back of a bicycle.

Down the lanes

Inga eating a coconut pancake in a covered market lane, baskets of red and green chillies on one side and blue crates of cut flowers on the other — Chillies down one side, cut flowers down the other, and a box of coconut pancakes in her hand. A balanced breakfast.

Wide flat woven baskets heaped with red, green and orange bird's eye chillies at a market stall, a vendor bagging up in the shop behind — Basket after basket of bird's eye chillies, sorted by colour and clearly not sold by the handful.

Pallets stacked high with orange mesh sacks of shallots and onions outside a green-shuttered shophouse in a Thai market — Shallots by the pallet. This is the wholesale end of the market, where nobody is buying one onion.

A ginger stall in a Thai market with trays of fresh ginger root and hand-written price cards reading 20 baht, two vendors standing behind — Ginger at twenty baht, written on a card and stabbed into the pile. Pricing doesn't need to be more complicated than that.

A woman in an orange top, blue apron and white gloves sitting on a crate shredding ginger into fine strips on a board weighted down with two bricks — Shredding ginger by hand, with two bricks holding the board still. She'd already filled the basket behind her.

A pink plastic basket full of small green bananas on a market pavement, with a bag of green limes tucked in behind it — Small green bananas, price scrawled straight onto the basket in marker pen.

Kanom krok

The best thing we ate all week came off a cart parked in the middle of a lane. Kanom krok are little coconut pancakes cooked in a cast iron pan full of dimples, crisp underneath and still molten in the middle, then folded together in pairs. You eat them straight out of the box before they cool down, which is the only correct way.

A vendor in a face mask and apron working a cart of dimpled cast iron pans making coconut pancakes, under a red sign showing a plate of the finished pancakes — The sign over the cart shows exactly what you're getting, which saves everyone a conversation.

Close-up of a hand pouring white coconut batter from an aluminium kettle into the dimples of a hot cast iron pan — Batter poured straight from an aluminium kettle, one dimple at a time.

Rows of finished coconut pancakes resting on a wire rack above the griddle, some folded together in pairs with green spring onion inside — Cooked, folded in pairs and parked on the rack. The ones with spring onion in them are the ones to fight for.

Inga holding an open box of coconut pancakes beside the cart, the masked vendor working the griddle behind her and another customer waiting with a plate — One box was never going to be enough. It wasn't.

Back out on the street

A market street lined with old shophouses, strung end to end with rows of yellow royal flags and Thai national flags, handcarts and pickup trucks parked along one side — Outside, the whole street was strung with yellow royal flags and Thai flags. Nobody selling anything was looking up at them.

Markets are how we work out whether we like a place, and this one settled it. If you want the same thing at a bigger scale, there's our walk through the Bangkok street markets. For the rest of this trip, there's Walking Street after dark, the carved wooden Sanctuary of Truth, the fossil garden at the Million Years Stone Park and the naga staircase up Big Buddha Hill.