Table & Bazaar is food, markets, and drinks in the Thailand InfoBuffoon network. It is written for British visitors who want the table to make sense: what to order, how spicy is spicy, which lager is on ice, and which night market is dinner rather than a souvenir mall.
What you will find
We start from the plate you will actually be handed. Rice is the centre of a shared meal; noodles are usually one bowl each. Mai phet is a request, not a force field. The chilli caddy is part of the recipe. Prices are in baht, as bands when the sticker moves — rice boxes commonly 45–69 THB, Mama cups 15–30 THB. Shop alcohol hours are 11:00–14:00 and 17:00–midnight; major Buddhist holy days are dry at retail.
Vegetarian cooking in Thailand is a language problem as much as a diet: mangsawirat, jeh, fish sauce, kapi. Those notes live on Vegetarian and vegan.
Craft taps and festival dates draw on Bangkok Beer Guide — a local English-language calendar. Shop lagers (Singha, Chang, Leo) are still what most tables drink. Cans and chain fridges: beer catalogue.
Planning, visas, and the first week live on Gateway. Coasts, parks, and monsoon live on Land & Sea. Temples, the calendar, and festivals live on People & Spirit.
Who publishes this site
Tabaconda LLC, Florida, USA. Independent niche sites — not a tourism board, not a restaurant group, not a night-market landlord.
Table & Bazaar is the food guide in the Thailand InfoBuffoon set. This one is dinner, markets, and the drink in the ice bucket. The others exist so a curry page does not have to also be a visa page.
How we write
Facts that can go stale are dated. We would rather print a band (“about 45–69 THB”) than invent a pretty price. When a source is someone else’s beat — craft beer calendars — we name them and link them.
Kit searches (a mortar, a steamer) point at Amazon UK category pages; they are optional shopping, not why a stall is in the article. Legal small print: Affiliate disclosure.
We will not pretend 7-Eleven is the national cuisine, or that it is a joke. We will not flatten jeh into “vegan”. We will not send you to a stall because it photographs well from a tuk-tuk.
Heat is a setting, not a personality test. Mai phet is polite and often incomplete; Isan and southern food still arrive with a floor of chilli. The caddy exists so you finish the dish yourself instead of sending it back.
The table, without the folklore
A shared Thai meal is rice plus a few plates, not four “mains”. Noodles are usually one person. Ice in beer is normal at a plastic table and odd at a craft tap — ask. 7-Eleven is infrastructure: a rice box when the stall is shut, not a punchline. Fish sauce in a “vegetable” stir-fry is ordinary, not a gotcha; say what you need before the wok.
If you remember one rule: rice first, chilli last. The caddy exists so you do not have to shout your heat tolerance across a stall.
Craft beer in Bangkok is a small, legal, sometimes contract-brewed scene. Singha, Chang, and Leo are still what most ice buckets hold.
Night markets are not all equal. Some are dinner. Some are T-shirts under fluorescent tubes. Busy stalls with high turnover are the practical hygiene filter. Emptiness at lunch is the yellow flag, not a plastic stool. Ice in a drink from a busy shop is usually factory ice.
Tipping is not a London percentage. A small round-up at sit-down air-con is fine. Street stalls take the posted or spoken price. One bill is typical. Do not perform a six-way split over 60-baht noodles.
Regional cooking is not a tasting menu. Central, north, Isan, and south are different palates. Green curry is not “the spicy one” and som tam is not a salad in the lettuce sense. Pages exist so those names stop being interchangeable.
What we will not do
We will not rank “best pad Thai in Bangkok” as if a city of millions had a winner you could print. We will not treat a cooking class as a substitute for knowing how to order. We will not hide shrimp paste because it complicates a diet story.
We will not contradict the drinks page on alcohol windows. We will not invent a tap list for a bar that changes weekly.
Where People & Spirit already owns a holy-day dry evening, we send you there. Where Gateway already owns the first-week SIM, we send you there too.
Corrections
Wrong market hour, a beer name, a chilli note, a rice-box band that has shifted: Contact. Name the page. A dated photo of the warmer or the till is worth more than a paragraph of outrage. Shelf prices move; if our band is off, show the sticker.
Related reading
- After landing: First week, Money and SIM
- Island weather before you book the seafood: Which coast
- Holy-day dry evenings: Thai calendar
- Start on this site: How to order, Street food, Thai beer and spirits