David Thompson, the Michelin-starred evangelist for Thai food, takes Ian Tucker on an evening tour of Bangkok's family-run street food stalls, the true home of the country's culinary tradition

Suppertime in downtown Bangkok. A rubbish truck rumbles along the potholed road. An emaciated Chinese man with ribs like chopsticks drags his feet along the wet cement. A rat trots along the pavement with something yellow in its teeth, past our cook and inside the shutters of the premises next door.

Welcome to Bangkok's Chinatown, home of one of the world's most piquant culinary experiences. Our guide is David Thompson – an Australian who has spent the best part of 25 years researching, cooking and evangelising about Thai food: who was awarded the first Michelin star in Europe for a Thai restaurant and was the author of Thai Food – which made the Top 10 of OFM's list of the best ever cookbooks last month.

Thompson has taken us on a 60-minute bumper-to-bumper cab journey across Bangkok's endless flyovers to sample some of the best street food the city can offer. Most of the streets are littered with stalls, stands and trucks, and Thompson has homed in on one. A hole in the wall, featuring a charcoal-heated wok that he reckons "hasn't been cleaned in 50 years". A fluent Thai speaker, Thompson's understanding of the culture often astonishes the locals. He orders everyone – that's the Observer photographer and me – the oyster omelette.

We sit on plastic stools and wait. We're the only farang or westerners around; as we are for the rest of the night. The omelettes arrive on plastic plates in various colours, with a finger bowl of chilli sauce. Cooking oysters has always seemed like a waste of carbon to me so my hopes are low, but they are rescued by what Thompson calls the "right mucosity" and crunch made possible by the searing wok. The chilli sauce is surprisingly anodyne and sweet; Thompson says he wishes he had the "audacity to bring my own". Yet for 60 baht (just over a quid) a pop it would be "discourteous".

Half a dozen other dishes are advertised here but all of our fellow diners choose the omelette. "If you ordered anything else they'd get confused, probably forgotten how to cook it," says Thompson. And this is how Thai street food operates. A stall or a truck gets a reputation for the best gung pat sadtor (stir-fried sadtor beans with prawns, shrimp paste and pork) or somesuch and word spreads; they may also do other meals but the queues will be for the prawn dish.

The knowledgeable will also walk on if the wrong family member is wok-side. The middle sister might be stingy with the fish sauce, and given the complex sweet, sour, salt and hot spicing of Thai dishes, the whole taste structure crumbles. But if you want another course, you need another stall. Luckily Thompson has a plan: mains are up the road. "I've got us a table in the best section, in the gutter," he says with characteristic mischief.

At this stall, Thompson feels confident enough to order a selection of dishes. The star attraction is slices of duck smoked over sugar cane. And there are plastic plates of pork stir-fried with Chinese olives ("I'm buggered if I know what they are," says Thompson), braised duck intestines ("It tastes like soft rubber bands, which is actually OK") and what turns out to be ever-present over our two days in Bangkok – a pungent red catfish curry. To spice things up further we are supplied with finger bowls of fish sauce and chillies; to mollify the heat, bowls of sticky rice; for a break from the heat, plates of raw Chinese cabbage, holy basil and sadtor beans; and to wash the heat away, Singha beer.

Thompson, who has been with his Thai partner in business and life, Tanongsak Yordwai, for 24 years, holds forth on the plight of the euro and gives his neo-Marxist analysis of the Thai political system. Soon the chatter fades in favour of the food. "This is not bad for something on a plastic plate," says Thompson.

So how did a 51-year-old Australian end up a world authority on Thai cooking? Thompson's training began in Sydney's French restaurants in the early 80s, but in 1986 after a holiday in Thailand his head was turned. He returned to Bangkok, spending two years learning all he could about Thai food. Which was tricky as there were no recipe books to study – dishes were passed down the generations. But Thompson found a teacher called Khun Sombat Janphetchara who had learned to cook at a royal palace. "In her hands the commonplace was transformed into something memorable," he says. He began to collect memorial books, published when a Thai died and which often included their favourite recipes.

He returned to Australia and opened a couple of celebrated Thai restaurants in Sydney. But in 2000 Thailand lured him back to consult at the government-backed Suan Dusit academy of Thai cooking – instructing chefs in the history and preparation of authentic Thai dishes. A year later he opened Nahm at the Halkin Hotel in London and in 2002 it became the first Thai restaurant to win a Michelin star. In the same year he published Thai Food – an exhaustive work that ran to nearly 700 pages. The 117-page introduction emphasised how Thai cuisine had evolved through migration, custom and economics – in many ways Thai Food is as much a cultural history as a recipe book.

The obvious question is why has it taken an Australian to win respect for Thai cuisine? Fuchsia Dunlop, who has explored China to write award-winning titles including Sichuan Cookery, says there are advantages to being an alien. "Sometimes it is outsiders who are interested in the older things, the traditions. As a foreigner you know what needs to be explained, what's appealing and what will freak people out. To be a kind of bridge, it helps not to be a local."

Thompson's latest venture is perhaps his most ambitious: to open a Thai restaurant in Bangkok. In the space previously occupied by a Mediterranean restaurant, he is opening a new Nahm in the chic environs of the Metropolitan hotel. Hotel reception staff say they are pleased since they won't have to send foreign guests away when they ask to eat Thai food. The opening has been delayed: the red shirt riots took place a block away which meant building slowed down; training chefs and creating a menu is taking perfectionist Thompson longer than expected – "I have one or two chefs who look at me with a degree of circumspection I find almost impertinent."

Earlier in the day, while builders work on the interior of the main dining room, Thompson and his team let the hotel staff and the Observer sample some curry dishes which he insists are only "60-70% there". He is most proud of a fish stomach curry, a dish that originates from the 1920s. Made from salted mackerel innards, chicken livers, cockles and a lot of chilli, it is an elemental combination of earth and fire. You might like to know the innards are discarded before serving.

There's also a grilled beef curry with chilli leaves, catfish nahm prik pao and a milder coconut crab curry. With each mouthful the eyes start to combust, "It's when the eardrums start to hurt that you know you've eaten enough chilli," says our chef.

One of the hotel staff says the food is like her grandmother used to make, which for Thompson couldn't be a finer compliment. "Food from that older generation is better, stronger. To get those undulant tastes that strike a deep chord rather than the superficial tastes you get with modern food, that for me is exciting, it's almost like I'm a culinary archeologist.

"Thai food ain't about simplicity. It's about the juggling of disparate elements to create a harmonious finish. Like a complex musical chord it's got to have a smooth surface but it doesn't matter what's happening underneath. Simplicity isn't the dictum here, at all. Some westerners think it's a jumble of flavours, but to a Thai that's important, it's the complexity they delight in."

Back to the evening downtown and we have moved on to dessert. Thompson has bought ripe durian, "the foie gras of fruit", from one stall – a fruit with an odour so pungent that Anthony Bourdain described it as "like french kissing your dead grandmother" – and ordered black sesame dumplings in fresh ginger from another. We devour the yellow garlicky ectoplasm – and the rich roasted seeds and sharp rhizome liquid of the second dessert make a great sweet and sour palate cleanser.

The food in Nahm is pure archive Thai, but the food we've been eating on the street stalls is a hybrid of Thai, Chinese and Malay – reflecting the waves of immigration, or as Thompson elegantly puts it, "the people pass through and the residue is the cuisine they leave behind". In Thompson's early years in Bangkok he would pass over these fusion dishes. Truth be told, despite its appearance in both of his books, he's a bit sniffy about pat thai – a dish that was created in the 1940s in response to a government competition. He says that if you ask for it at Nahm you are presented with the bill.

But his attitude to street food has softened and he claims to eat little else. A couple of generations ago, Thais were rural folk who ate at home and took pride in offering food to the monks, but as they have moved to the cities they are likely to grab a polythene bag of curry on the way home to reheat. There is almost a stigma attached to cooking for yourself. "There is an embarrassment about spending time in the kitchen, it is seen as old-fashioned and a sign that you haven't made it. Sometimes I know how they feel," Thompson jokes.

But for those of us not lucky enough to have these avenues of edibles at our front doors, Thompson has written Thai Street Food – a tribute to the stallholders and their hyphenated dishes. He was going to open a street food restaurant in London but that fell victim to the credit crunch, so I'm left with no alternative but to try to recreate the experience in my kitchen.

First, I must go to London's Chinatown to gather staples of Thai cooking: fish sauce, shrimp paste, white pepper, palm sugar, dried shrimp, sticky rice, pat thai noodles, siracha chilli sauce – all for around a third of the price and for three times the quantity than at a supermarket.

I decide to cook the dish that has a list of ingredients on the briefer side, the stir-fried minced beef with chillies and holy basil. Getting a wok hot enough on a domestic gas hob to give the meat a tasty singe is tricky – although a fattier cut than sirloin or smaller pieces might have been a better move. And although I opt for the low-end when it comes to numbers of scuds, the chilli overpowers the holy basil – but there's definitely something oddly soothing about the spicy, eggy, beefy, rice pudding-like result. My guinea pig friend is defeated by the heat once she ladles on the fish and chilli sauce – I suspect punters on Yaowarat Road wouldn't be so sissy. I resolve to try again with more basil, fattier morsels of meat and fewer chillies.

Next evening I try the Thai fried rice, substituting shallots for spring onions and crayfish for crab meat – and the results look and taste pretty delicious. The salt, black pepper and soy seasoning is way more subtle and I'm disappointed there's not enough for seconds. So until credit conditions improve, Thailand is fortunate to have Thompson, an emigré defender and propagator of a rich tradition. And restaurant launches aside, that situation is unlikely to change. "It's too late to return to Australia. I think the rest of my life will be here. I will always love Bangkok."

By Ian Tucker
Sunday 19 September 2010
www.theguardian.com

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