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.
The dessert page opens one 20 cm steamer. Som tam, the chilli caddy, Thai beer, and how to order open one 725 ml bottle of Squid Brand fish sauce. The craft-bar page and the vegetarian page still search, because the granite listings are size menus and fish sauce is the wrong product on the vegetarian page. Those links 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