Backpacker Cuisine

Article by: Austin Bush, July 2008

It all began with an order of Haad Yao Fried Rice, a bizarre concoction of rice fried with ketchup and chicken, enveloped in a thin omelette. Now, I've eaten lots of Thai dishes in nearly every region of Thailand and have never come across anything quite like Haad Yao Fried Rice. I'd also never seen a green curry the way it was served the next night: soupy and impotent and laden with carrots, cauliflower and potatoes. In fact, once I actively sought it out, I began to discover an entire repertoire of food on Ko Pha-Ngan's Haad Yao that I'd never come across, dishes that weren't quite Thai, but that weren't quite foreign either. Western dishes one would be unlikely to find in the West, and Thai dishes one would be hard-pressed to find in the village up the road. There were dull flavours, inaccurate interpretations of Western dishes, bland takes on Thai, facsimile menus and mystery ingredients. I called this genre of cuisine Backpacker Food.

There were dull flavours, inaccurate interpretations of Western dishes, bland takes on Thai, facsimile menus and mystery ingredients.

The simple fact that backpacker food exists begs the question, why does one need comfort food when on the road? Isn't the point of travelling to try new things? Admittedly, there are times when a tender tummy might cry out for familiar flavours and textures. Perhaps this is when a queasy Italian would order the Spaghetti 'Cabonara', or a homesick native of the islands the Pork Chop Hawaiian. (I'm still not exactly sure where Contigi Prawn, Fried Chicken Mayonnaise, No Name Falafel-Style Chicken or Cauliflower Cheese come from.) But the ubiquity of such menu items suggests that they are the norm rather than the exception.

Backpacker breakfasts in particular seemed to have the least in common with the local food. The English, with their Full English Breakfast (coffee or tea, baked beans, toast, fried bacon, fried eggs, fried cheese and fried mushrooms) seemed to dominate this area. The Swiss, with their muesli, often little more than uncooked oatmeal with a few cornflakes thrown in, have also had a palpable, though unpalatable, impact. And the ubiquitous 'American Breakfast' of instant coffee, lighter-than-air white bread, warm hotdogs and oily fried eggs isn't doing much to promote the image of American food abroad, and certainly isn't a good way to start the day.

If you do make an effort to go 'local', Thai-style backpacker food is often just as bizarre, if not more so, than the quasi-Western food. Authentic southern Thai cooking is a vibrant seafood-based cuisine that is among the most full-flavoured in the country, but the guesthouse kitchens of Haad Yao served up consistently weak Thai-style salads, limp tasteless stir-fries, barely-there curries, and of course, when all else failed, mediocre phat thai.

Backpacker breakfasts in particular seemed to have the least in common with the local food.

Even on Bangkok's Khao San Road, nestled in the heart of a city where one's stomach is spoilt for choice, backpacker food still rules. Along the strip you'll find carts selling greasy fried noodles that are phat thai in name only, tables hawking yogurt and muesli, shwarma stalls, well-stocked drink carts, and - in what has become a virtual cottage industry - vendors making fruit smoothies and fresh-squeezed orange juice.

Off the street, Khao San Road's guesthouse restaurant menus are more expansive than those of Haad Yao, but the flavours are generally the same. The area's saving grace is its abundance of cheap and relatively authentic Israeli food. Generally bland, mostly vegetarian and inherently accessible, dishes such as falafel, hummus and pita bread are backpacker foods in spirit if not in practice.

Back on Haad Yao, if the lack of authentic Thai food was getting to you, you could always order American Fried Rice, rice fried with ketchup, sliced hotdogs and sweet raisins. Despite the name, the dish is found all over Thailand, and is particularly popular among children and poor students. It was, as far as I could tell, the only truly Thai dish on the menu.