My Bangkok Birthday: Chinatown, Jek Pui Curry, and a 700 Baht Cocktail

I ended up in Chinatown for my birthday. Not because I planned it. I rarely plan birthdays. I was in Bangkok, I had a free afternoon, and Chinatown happened.

What followed was one of those days that reminds you why Bangkok at street level is still one of the most interesting cities in Asia — if you know where to look and you are willing to wander.

The Budget

I kept track. I always keep track. Here is what a birthday in Chinatown Bangkok actually costs:

Lunch — Jek Pui curry, Yaowarat Road: 68 THB
This is the place from the Netflix show. The curry vendor who has been at the same spot for decades, serving rice with curry ladled from steel pots at about forty baht per scoop. I had two scoops and water. Sixty-eight baht. Less than two dollars. The curry was extraordinary — complex, deep, properly oily in the way that Bangkok street food should be and that most hotel restaurants are afraid to replicate.

Afternoon drinks — Bar Bukowski, Charoenkrung area: 300 THB
Hidden bar. No sign outside that I could find. The kind of place where you have to know it exists or know someone who knows. Named after Charles Bukowski, which tells you something about the clientele. Dark interior, strong cocktails, the bartender who nods when you order without explaining yourself. Three hundred baht for a drink in a place like this is honestly underpriced.

Discovery — Potong Restaurant and Bar: (ended up there by accident)
I walked past a building on a back soi and went in because I was curious. I did not know what it was. Google it now: Potong is run by Pam Soontornyanakij, who has been named best female chef in Asia. I had a cocktail. The space is a former Chinese medicine shop that has been converted into something extraordinary — the kind of place that Bangkok produces without announcing itself. Arrived by accident, left understanding it was not an accident at all.

Evening — Opium cocktail bar, Charoenkrung: 700 THB
The Opium cocktail. Yes, 700 baht for one cocktail. Yes, worth it. The bar is designed around the old opium trade history of Charoenkrung — the neighbourhood that was Bangkok’s original commercial district when the city was built for riverine trade. The cocktail came with theatre and explanation. It was the kind of drink you take a long time finishing because you are thinking about it.

The Total

Five drinks. Two meals. Transport. The full day came to 2,064 THB, which is roughly 61 US dollars. Five drinks plus two meals plus getting around a major Asian city for sixty-one dollars. On a birthday.

I have had birthday dinners in cities where a single meal costs more than that. I have paid 200 euros for a birthday dinner in Europe that was technically impressive and completely forgettable. The Jek Pui curry at sixty-eight baht is not forgettable. The Potong cocktail in an old medicine shop is not forgettable. The sixty-one dollar Bangkok birthday is not forgettable.

Chinatown Bangkok — What It Actually Is

Yaowarat is Bangkok’s Chinatown — the district where Chinese merchants settled in the 18th century when King Rama I moved the capital to Bangkok and needed the existing Chinese trading community to relocate from the royal palace grounds. They moved to the stretch of riverfront that became Yaowarat, and the neighbourhood has kept its commercial intensity and its Chinese character ever since.

The main road — Yaowarat Road — is gold shops and neon signs and sidewalk food stalls from early evening until late night. Narrow sois lead off it into the older part of the neighbourhood where the real food is: the bird’s nest soup places, the shark fin restaurants that you can still find if you are looking, the dim sum places open from 5 AM. Charoenkrung Road, which runs parallel to the river, is where the regeneration has happened — the old shophouses converted to bars, galleries, and restaurants by people who understood what they had.

The Charoenkrung Shift

What has happened in the Charoenkrung area over the past decade is interesting. A strip of riverfront that was dusty and commercial — print shops, warehouses, old trading houses — has become Bangkok’s most genuinely creative neighbourhood. Not in the manufactured way of a real estate development project. In the way that happens when artists and bar owners and creative people find cheap rents in a neighbourhood with good bones and start working in it.

The BACC (Bangkok Art and Culture Centre) is a short walk away. The River City complex on the river has galleries. The street between them has a dozen places worth spending time in. It is the Bangkok that locals know and that tourists on the Khaosan Road circuit miss completely.

Very Good Life in Bangkok

I came back that evening having had a better birthday than I had planned for. This is what Bangkok does when you are not trying to make it perform. When you are willing to walk into a building because you are curious about what is inside. When you eat curry at a street stall for sixty-eight baht because it looked good, not because a guidebook told you to.

Five drinks plus two meals plus transport. Sixty-one dollars. A very good life in Bangkok.