Thai Lunch

There is no lunch.

There's breakfast. There may be dinner.

There is no lunch.

By the time you reach what you consider lunchtime in Thailand, you've already eaten three times - maybe four - maybe more.

You eat breakfast. There is breakfast. There is a first meal of the day. What you eat for breakfast isn't like anything you've eaten for breakfast in the past. Well, maybe. You've eaten fried chicken in the morning before, but you have never eaten fried chicken that tasted like the chicken was killed an hour before it was fried and presented to you with a sweet chili sauce and rice. Not in Chang Rai at 7 o'clock in the morning you haven't.

You eat again in a couple hours. This time it's on the streets of Bangkok. You can feel the city as you spear freshly cubed pineapple out of a plastic bag with a toothpick. No, really. You feel the city. It is stuck on your face. You run the napkin presented with the pineapple across your brow and when you look at it, it's grey. Strangely, this makes the pineapple taste better. The cool sweetness of the fruit combats the sticky heat of the city street.

The pineapple takes you no time at all to eat. It's that good. Sadly, it's not all that filling, so when you turn the corner and see a vendor selling grilled pork on a stick, you have to have it. And when you finish that, you need the iced coffee next door to wash it down. The coffee is also served in a plastic bag, suspended by a rubber band with a straw to access the sweet nectar.

It's lunchtime.

At least you think it is. It's the middle of the day and it's time to eat. Then again, you are going to eat again in a couple hours, so maybe that's lunchtime. Or maybe lunch is an hour after that, when you find yourself at a house tucked along one of the alleys that make up the vast labyrinth that is Thailand's capital city, your hands completely purple from tearing open the regally ripe Mongkut (mangosteen) fruit. In Thailand it is the queen of fruits, and you eat about fifteen of them.

In Pattaya, you know it's dinner because you travel by car to a restaurant. It is perhaps the most frightening car ride of your life, weaving in and out of traffic with hard starts and stops. But once parked, the journey to the restaurant doesn't get any easier. Avoiding getting yanked into a bar by steering clear of eager prostitutes in Thailand's sex capital is just as difficult as negotiating the city streets by automobile.

Those who say it is not the destination, but rather the journey that is important, have never been to the Flying Vegetable restaurant. While the treacherous journey along Pattaya's streets is memorable, you find the destination to be far more rewarding. While sitting in the outdoor restaurant, you wonder what the cook is preparing outside the store, and why there appears to be a couple of the servers across the street holding plates. Well, when the cook hurls the vegetables over traffic to the servers across the street, and they in turn dodge traffic to present the plate to your table, you realize there is nothing ironic about the restaurant's name.(see the flying vegetable video)

This was your last meal of the day. We'll call it dinner because it was destination dining and the fare presented resembled that of a full, proper meal. There may be five or six mongkuts later, but for now, you're done.

And so you go to bed knowing there will be breakfast tomorrow. And you're pretty sure there will be dinner. But which of the seven meals between them is lunch?


There is no lunch