Khlong Toei: Inside the Legendary Market That Feeds Bangkok

At the center of Bangkok’s world-renowned culinary scene is a market known as Khlong Toei. Its one of the world’s largest Wet Markets, and one of the last surviving in a global metropolitan center. Khlong Toei is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and every hour sees new ingredients arriving from all corners of Southeast Asia and a rhythm only understood by those who work within the famous- or infamous- market. So to understand Khlong Toei, we spent a full cycle- 24 hours- inside the narrow alleys, joined by chefs, customers, historians and workers to try to leave with some kind of picture of the market that feeds Bangkok.

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0:00 – Introduction
1:32 – Across the Moat
3:54 – The Produce Behind the Food
6:00 – The Origins of Wet Markets
9:23 – A Walk Around
10:42 – Visiting Khlong Toei with a Master Chef
12:56 – Definitive Ingredients
15:55 – East and West
19:11 – The People of Khlong Toei
22:16 – Building a Market
24:45 – Seafood
26:55 – Migrants from Myanmar
28:35 – The Hidden Burmese Canteen
31:34 – Wet Markets and Grocery Stores
35:35 – The Strike
39:13 – Bangkok Pat
41:47 – The History of Khlong Toei
45:37 – The Market at Night
47:58 – Chef Riley Sanders
49:42 – Rare Ingredients
52:53 – The Soul of the Market
54:54 – Stories from a Michelin-Starred Chef
57:19 – 2 AM
58:53 – A Long Rant
1:04:27 – Sunrise
1:07:32 – Breakfast
1:10:30 – Reflections on 24 Hours
1:12:43 – Khlong Toei
1:15:16 – The End of a Very Long Day

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Video Credits:

(Title Card) So this is a technique that I don’t think you’ve seen before, because I’ve never seen it before. We’re getting delivery of fish- I’m going to step back because these are splashing. The way to get them out of the truck because these buckets are so heavy seems to be they

Put a tire on the ground- and (groans). Welcome to Khlong Toei market. The culinary center of Bangkok and one of the largest wet markets on the entire planet. It’s a nonstop machine- taking in the bounty of Thailand and sending meats, seafood, and

Produce to every corner of the capital- 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. In the heart of one of the world’s culinary powers, this is the engine that keeps it all in motion. And we’re here for all of it.

We’re spending an entire day and night inside the market to try to understand how it works. The ingredients, the culture, and the people who keep this city eating. It’s a full 24 hours inside one of the world’s most fascinating markets, today on OTR. (Title Cards) When you enter Khlong Toei market from the

Rama 4 highway, the very first thing- right at the entrance is the live poultry section. As an introduction, it’s off the charts…a punch right to the nostrils and a middle finger to any kind of Western sensibility. Up next is bridge across an old canal full of market waste, separating Khlong Toei from

Urban Bangkok like some kind of toxic medieval moat. This almost feels like a test; something meant to weed out those who came searching for processed meats and sterilized vegetables. Be warned- this is not for you. But for the rest of us- well, welcome inside one of the greatest celebrations of food the

World has ever seen. So the first thing that comes to mind when you come to a market like Khlong Toei, even for me as a chef who’s spent my life going to wet markets, is the complete sensory overload. And I’m- I’m in the way.

It’s going to be really, really hard not to be in the way, as this is…commerce going on all around, we’ve got guys pushing carts coming through, we’ve got motorcycles going right through these narrow alleys here in the market, this is Khlong Toei.

It’s Thailand’s biggest wet market, it’s probably my favorite place in the entire city, so yeah, this is going to be a really interesting next 24 hours, and let’s start exploring. It’s hard to put the scale of Khlong Toei into perspective. It’s huge…it’s a massive place.

There are no official measurements and the actual size waxes and wanes as carts set up and tear down throughout the day, but the best guess is it’s around a hundred fifty thousand square meters- the size of about thirty football fields that happen to be packed with some of the world’s best food.

Here you’ll find Thailand. Fruits and vegetables, meat and seafood. Dry goods, regional delicacies and mountains of curry paste and all of it soon to be made into iconic dishes at restaurants across the city. Thai cuisine can feel like a mystery…something ancient and fascinating and packed with incredible

Flavors and world-famous specialties and thousands of years of history- but visiting the local wet market, it’s there- out in the open. The secret to being a chef is that it’s not magic, no matter what we want you the customer to believe.

It’s a math equation- add the right ingredients in the right order with a little bit of technique and you can recreate literally anything. And when it comes to Thai food, all of those ingredients can be found at Khlong Toei Market.

It’s here where chefs come to buy the stuff that they know how to combine into magic. As just one example, there’s an Isaan restaurant not far from here where we filmed last year. Isaan food is the Thai regional cuisine related to the culture of Laos, famous for big flavors,

Grilled meats, and Som Tam, and we chose that street cart for filming because it’s one of the very best. And no sooner had we arrived in the market this morning than we bumped into the owner’s mother, Wan Di, making her daily rounds to get ready for service, just like she has for

The last fifty years. So what is she getting today? (Speaking Thai) Believe it or not even in a place this big and overwhelming, running into someone we know almost immediately is almost to be expected. This is more than a market- it’s a center of Bangkok’s community.

A place were third-generation vendors sell to third-generation customers and somehow, even at this scale everyone seems to know each other. Today places like Khlong Toei are unique, the last of a dying culture, only found today in a fast-shrinking part of the world.

But the wet market as a center of cuisine is something with a long and very important history all across the planet. The first place where fresh goods were sold at one central location, at least as far as we can guess from archeology, was in Ancient Egypt, where a food trading hub flourished

On the banks of the Nile for 500 years before construction even began on the Great Pyramid of Giza. It was along the Nile where we first see markets start to form- places where farmers would bring produce like cucumbers, dates, peas and figs, along with staple grains and dried fish.

And these first markets didn’t just allow cities to grow and expand even without immediate access to farmland- they also gave rise to new kinds of businesses, like, for example, breweries, with the first in Egypt appearing in the city of Abydos around 3000 BC, right

Next to a market that happened to sell wheat and barley. Now I have no idea whether the concept of this kind of market spread from Egypt or simply evolved on its own in multiple places around the same time but either way, it wouldn’t

Take long before food trading centers could be found almost wherever there were people. The first big step that took the ancient farmers market and started down the path towards modernization comes around 500 BC, right at the beginning of the powerful Persian Empire.

As Cyrus the Great came to power and Pasargadae grew into a thriving city, vendors would arrive on camelback and set out their goods on the roads- onions, chickpeas, rhubarb and dried spices. So Cyrus, as he implemented a series of revolutionary laws and policies, enacted an ordinance regulating markets to certain defined spaces.

The first zoning laws- which created officially sanctioned markets that would be known as “bazaars”. From Persia the planned construction of markets would spread to the Middle East, where they’d take on the Arabic name, “souk”, and eventually to Ancient Greece, where we see the next step

In the historical progression; with their markets, or “Agoras”, strategically placed in the areas of highest foot-traffic, with vendors targeting customers as they left popular venues like theatres or sporting arenas. These markets would become not just functional places but centers for community, for socialization

And gossip, and as this concept moved East along the newly-established Silk Road, it would be the Chinese around the 7th century AD who would introduce two more components that would forever change market culture. First, it was in China where farmers and traders started sharing space with cooked-food vendors-

Street food stalls selling snacks and prepared meals for those too busy to cook themselves. And second, with the popularity of these mixed-use markets, we find in Xi’an the first markets to stay open 24 hours a day. Just like Khlong Toei. Anyway.

There’s a lot more to this story but first, it’s time to start exploring the market. (Music Playing) This is like the “Thailand stall”. You’ll see these all over the market. We have lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime, we have dill, we have the lime leaves and

The limes themselves, this is fingerroot, which is a really fun ingredient to play with. We have tamarind, and see here, we even have the lemongrass, kaffir lime and galangal- the “Holy Trinity of Tom Yum” as Pailin’s Kitchen would call it- all rubber-banded together, just grab it and go. Yeah, alright, cool.

(Music Playing) When you arrive in a new place and you want to figure out where you are- take a crash course in the real city- you go to the nearest wet market. But when you’re a chef, it’s not optional.

It’s not just something you want to see when you travel, it’s the reason you go in the first place. This is The Duc Ngo- better known as Chef Duc. He’s a legend in the Berlin restaurant scene and is often referred to as Europe’s best Asian chef.

And he’s just arrived in Bangkok for the first time in twenty years. Chef Duc is originally from Hanoi, born into a Vietnamese-Cantonese family, and along with those two cuisines, his specialty is Japanese, as beginning in the 1990s he spent years earning his stripes as a sushi master.

Of the nineteen restaurants Chef has opened, from Berlin to Frankfurt to Saint Tropez, he’s won multiple accolades in the Michelin Guide, been included in a list of the world’s fifty best chefs and named Berlin’s Top Culinary Innovator. And this is his first time at Khlong Toei market.

Well we’ll have to be fast because we keep getting pushed out of the way. Chef- yeah, so busy- nice to see you. This is not our first time meeting, we had lunch together a couple of days ago. Yes, two days ago, it was amazing.

I’m sure as somebody who has been a career chef but also- your specialties are Vietnamese, Japanese, French, all these different styles of food that you’ve- what’s the first thing you do when you go to a new place? You go to the wet market!

You find out what are the ingredients, what are people buying? To me, if you want to understand a culture, you go to the wet market. Totally right. I’m always heading first to markets, or to Chinatowns to the markets, so that I can see what the ordinary people are eating.

Then I take from that a lot of inspiration. Ohh, bamboo, I love bamboos. This one- I make a salad with that. So far from what you’ve seen, and we’ve been in the market for ten seconds, how available is this in Europe? A lot of the produce that you’re seeing?

You can get most things by now I’d guess? By now you can get, I would say, 30 percent of what you see here you can get in Germany. But not at this quality of course. Thirty percent is not a big number I would have expected higher.

I would say from this stand I would get only the tomatoes, maybe some of these herbs, mango, that’s it. This would be always deep-frozen. Ok, of course. And all this stuff, we don’t get. But from this stand, maybe more. Can you identify this ingredient?

This is seasonal, this is just this month that these are sold here. This is larva, no? Larva, right? You’re on the right track, this is red ant eggs. (Music Playing) There are certain ingredients that tell you

Where you are- like if somehow you were dropped into a random wet market if you know cuisine you could get your bearings just by looking at what’s on the tables. In Chef Duc’s home city of Hanoi it would be stuff like mint, sawtooth coriander, fish sauce and lots and lots of Vietnamese sausages.

In Sichuan province, where I learned to cook, you’ll see peanuts, sesame, dried chilis, and of course Sichuan peppers, or Hua Jiao. And here it’s the endemic staples of Thailand; coconut, birds-eye chilis, curry paste, and produce ranging from mangoes to long beans to so much more.

So you’ve seen five percent of the market altogether, but your first reactions? It’s overwhelming, it’s really overwhelming, and I really want to jump into it and take it all home. A few months ago on the channel, we did a video about a bean called the sataw, or the stink bean.

We chose that subject for a video because it absolutely blew my mind that after 15 years as a chef- after traveling around much of the world, I could still find ingredients I hadn’t known existed. The amazing thing about wet markets- not grocery stores, but places like this- is that when

You’re lucky enough to find yourself in a city that has one, you might see things- not mass-market stuff but random local ingredients- that’ll take your palate somewhere it’s never been. And for someone who spends their career in this industry, I mean why else would you do it?

As a chef, I would get frustrated as I’m sure you do, and when I say “frustrated” I mean violently angry, when something I put on my menu all of a sudden would be not available. My vendor would have something and I’d put it on the menu and all of a sudden it would

Be out of stock, and that’s something that is frustrating. At the same time, when all of your life is with this consistency of what the grocery store is going to be carrying- what the Harris-Teeter or the Kroger or the Food Lion is going to

Have, Tesco, and you know and it’s predictable and you can build your menu around it…there is still something that I think is the difference between being a chef and being a cook, and that is coming to a market like this and walking through it, not knowing what you’re going

To find, and seeing something that maybe just came off the truck for the first time that season and being like, I want to build a dish around that. I love this kind of thing where it’s unpredictable, you don’t know what you’re going to find,

And it’s different- if we come back in a month, ten percent of these ingredients are going to be turned over to something completely different. And it’s like that all year round, and that to me is the fun of cooking. If you can’t enjoy that as a chef, what are you doing?

You’re totally right, and I was always thinking about this subject, like being a real cook, to have the challenge of what you have every day, and how many, and then you sell it to the people and they are still happy and coming back. That’s the challenge in the Western world.

Here is different, here it’s like vendors or little restaurants have an amount of fish ball soups that they serve from 9 in the morning to 11, then it’s sold out. They just make a break, and start it again tomorrow because they don’t do more.

But in the Western world, we’re used to having everything at every time. And that’s actually a bad thing to have, that makes the world and the environment maybe- because the demand is so high, after a while, if I put it on the menu, everybody wants to

Eat a fillet, and there’s no fillet anymore, and you have to grow them faster. So it continues to be a very bad thing for the world. Or you want strawberries in December, and you’ve got to put it on a container ship

And send them across the ocean, and number one it’s not fresh, number two as you said you’re burning fuel- there is- I think to me it is something where we all have the responsibility to understand seasonality in ingredients. Never mind the fact that you’re going to eat better when you understand seasonality.

Totally, totally. The people here in Southeast Asia eat better than us in the Western world. Because here, it’s all fresh and seasonal, from the farmers outside the city. And we in the Western society, we have to go to the supermarket and get stuff from ten

Thousand kilometers away, and we pay a lot of money for that, and it’s s***. That’s what makes me angry sometimes, when I’m here. It’s like, these people live for a hundred dollars a month, but they still eat better than us. (Speaking Thai) There are tens of thousands of people who work at Khlong Toei Market. The vendors, sellers, butchers, packers, delivery drivers, security guards and maintenance staff are the people who don’t just power this one place- they literally make the city’s legendary food scene possible.

It’s a hard job- beyond the long hours, it’s physically taxing, and when the summer monsoons arrive the workers are still here, rain or shine, making sure Bangkok’s restaurants get the products they need to stay in business. Many of the workers live within the market, or in the dormitories right outside.

And since almost nobody’s on a salary, and their pay comes from the work, many of the people who rely on the market for their living never take a single day off. In the chaos of the morning rush, it’s hard to pay attention to the parallel market- the

One meant for the workers who live here. But around lunchtime, there’s a shift in the balance. For at least a short time, there are no restaurant clients; everyone’s got their orders for lunch and nobody needs to restock yet.

Everyday customers are on their own lunch breaks or staying out of the sun at the hottest time of day, and that means we get a look behind the curtain. There’s another world hidden between the food stalls. Inside the heart of Khlong Toei there are hair salons, cell phone shops, clothing stores

And even a dentist and a medical clinic. And that doesn’t include the dozens of places to eat meant for the market workers, places that fill up in the 12 o’clock hour. There are people who live their entire life within these few blocks, and for some, well that’s all they’ve ever known.

They were born here, raised here and this is actually home, as it’s been for the families who settled this land before the market was constructed. Basically, the story goes that before 1947 this was all empty real estate. So with post-World War II funding from the World Bank, work was completed on a container

Port- the first of its kind in the kingdom. The new facility- officially called Bangkok Port but unofficially known as Khlong Toei- would open Thailand’s agriculture and factories to the world, and handle as much as 98% of the country’s imports.

It would need workers- lots of them- and so the King issued a proclamation that the empty land outside the harbor could be settled by any migrants who came to work the docks. Tens of thousands arrived and by 1948, this area was the home of a makeshift community-

A true melting pot of able-bodied men and women and their families from Isaan, Southern Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar. The idea for a large-scale market came within the first years of the opening of Khlong Toei Port. Part of the purpose was to service the port staff; I mean, this migrant district was quickly

Becoming the most densely populated part of the entire city. But it was more than that- it was also a chance to change the way food was sold. Until the 1950s Bangkok still functioned as it had for two centuries.

There was the city, and on the outskirts were the farms, and in between were the markets. If you wanted fruits and vegetables, you waited for the boats to arrive at your canal every week or two, or you went north to the trading hubs near Nonthaburi.

For rice, the markets were in the east, selling goods from Chachoengsao. And for seafood, you’d travel south to Samut Prakan. But Khlong Toei port saw boats arriving every hour from the farthest reaches of Thailand. From the neighboring countries and the home regions of so many of Bangkok’s residents.

So, a market here could be something different- a place where everything from everywhere could come in fresh, with the added bonus of selling ingredients that local people wanted and until that point couldn’t get. It’s not a coincidence that the first Isaan restaurants in Bangkok opened in the 1950s.

That that decade also sees the first local southern Thai places, the first Khao Gaeng counters selling a vast array of regional dishes and the explosion of what we now call modern Thai cuisine. It all started here- because of Khlong Toei market.

For a visitor to a coastal country like Thailand, one of the most fascinating parts of going to a wet market is the stuff that came from the water- here with a heavy emphasis on three ingredients essential to Bangkok cuisine. There’s Thai mackerel, sold fresh and dried.

Clown featherback fish, minced and packaged along with long beans and basil for use in the ubiquitous fish cakes, and of course, river shrimp, straight from the Chao Phraya, the foundation of local cooking since the first settlements in this region- the kind of stuff sold long before the city became a modern melting pot.

(Speaking Thai) Today, the workers at the market are a mixture of the family members and descendants of the first migrants to settle the land at Khlong Toei port, and a newer wave of immigrants- those who came to Bangkok in recent years for economic opportunity, or to escape violence and conflict at home.

There’s a hierarchy among the market staff, visible when you look closely. The fruit and vegetable sellers and the permanent carts with the best locations are typically the old-school families here since the beginning, the beef trade dominated by Pattani Muslims

From the south, pork and dry goods sold by Chinese-Thai merchants, seafood run by locals from the fishing villages along the river and almost every other job- migrants from neighboring countries. The coffee cart we visited was operated by a husband and wife from Laos, and the guy

Pushing the giant basket- well he’s Karen- a persecuted minority from across the border in Myanmar. As a matter of fact, almost all of the laborers at the market- a vast majority of the total number of people employed at Khlong Toei- are Burmese; migrants and refugees from Thailand’s war-torn neighbor to the west.

As the percentage of market workers from Myanmar has increased, so has the stuff here meant for them- their own market-within-the-market-within-the-market. Khlong Toei might be known as the center for Thai food, but it’s also unequivocally the best place in Bangkok to find an incredible concentration of Burmese lunch counters, snack stalls and ingredients.

Most of the curry counters here are actually Burmese, and so are the places selling deep-fried snacks and samosas. And if we want to really understand the inner workings of the market, not to mention track down the very best food, well we need to find a mid-afternoon snack.

(Music Playing) This is a market that’s full of secrets. And maybe none of them are bigger or more surprising than what you’ll find here- right inside the main market building just inside the Rama 4 entrance. It’s a big part of the market and where you’ll probably find yourself at some point

In almost any visit, but it turns out there’s a second floor, up a staircase hidden in plain sight. And at the top is a massive and cavernous space that in the past was used for storage or mostly left vacant.

But around four months ago, a Burmese company that operates a dozen restaurants in Myanmar decide to rent it out, to turn it into something Khlong Toei really needed. A community center not for the customers and not even for the average worker, but for the migrants from Myanmar.

Inside here, there are two Burmese hair salons, a nail studio, a bar and most importantly, a canteen- a sprawling restaurant where the cooks and staff are themselves Burmese and spend each day starting just after sunrise- preparing the tastes of home for the market’s migrants and refugees.

And today, for us, because honestly it doesn’t get much more exciting than this. (Music Playing) Ok, so I’ve assembled my plate. This is super cool, this airplane-hangar-sized space that’s being turned into a Burmese cultural center. I named it that- they’re not calling it that, but two hair salons, a nail salon, a

Couple of restaurants and a bar, and it’s all intended for the workers here at the market. We have a Burmese vegetable stew, we have this amazing chicken curry which as you can see, I’ve already dived into, going to get myself a little bit more.

We have the laphet thoke- our favorite fermented tea leaf salad. The nan gyi thoke, which is thick rice noodles in a chicken curry, which we added some chili, some lime and some shallot- and if that sounds like what you do to a Khao Soi, there’s

A reason, they’re all from that similar amazing part of the world. We have the vegetables to be dipped into the types of fermented fish paste, and then we have some crispy fish. So this is our lunch, and what a cool find this is at the market.

It’s also cool, and outside is really hot, so we’re going to sit and just enjoy this. (Title Cards) Alright after an afternoon snack and before Khlong Toei gets busy again, we need to pick up our story of how places like this came to be.

We left off with markets having grown into community centers, with help from the Egyptians, Persians, Greeks and Chinese. So let’s jump ahead to the 14th century in Europe, which is at the end of a massive boom in population that saw the western part of the continent more than double over a period

Of 300 years. While this expansion was made possible by the souks, agoras, and bazaars that remained the center of society, the density of these new cities led to demand for easy access to not just vegetables, but dry goods; staple grains and non-perishable items.

In Europe, starting in the 1300s, these necessities would be consolidated and sold at shops given the name grocers, or grossiers- derived from Latin “grossarius”, meaning wholesale or a vendor who sells items in bulk. It’s the same root as the word “gross”- as in, gross product or revenue.

Now these groceries, as they were, didn’t take off immediately- that’s mainly because the same conditions that led to their development also created the overcrowding that in 1346 brought on the bubonic plague, which would cut that population almost in half in the span of seven years.

It took until the age of colonization, in the 16th century, for dry goods stores to open around the world- and they’d especially become a feature in the new American colonies. In the Americas it would be common for a town grocer- not a produce market- to serve as

The central part of new settlements, with traditional markets a weekly or bi-weekly occurrence selling vegetables from farms and fresh fish from the Atlantic. As the western world industrialized beginning around the year 1760, jobs and stores became specialized, and dry-goods grocers were soon joined along downtown Main Streets by bricks-and-mortar

Shops that sold specific products…greengrocers selling vegetables, butcher shops portioning meat and bakeries with fresh-baked breads. In 1906 Upton Sinclair published his famous book “The Jungle”- detailing conditions in meatpacking plants in Chicago, which caused a public outcry and forced passage of the world’s first labeling laws, food safety regulations that essentially ended the American

Version of farm-to-blanket wet markets. The first businesses that combined the inventories of specialized shops and outdoor markets were simple counters in front of large warehouses, where customers would order at a counter and wait for the shopkeeper to assemble their goods.

And then in 1916, we see the first self-service supermarket, called, of all things, the Piggly Wiggy, in Memphis, Tennessee. Supermarkets would become a feature in the United States to comply with government regulations, but their spread around the world was not instantaneous. Market culture was obviously ingrained throughout the East and the global south.

The first western-style big-box grocery store in Southeast Asia opened in Vietnam as recently as 1967, and in Thailand in 1972; a place called Foodland, around four kilometers to the northwest of Khlong Toei. For Bangkok’s urban elite and the growing foreign population, Foodland, and the many

Other grocery stores that would follow, would provide a haven for imported products and packaged ingredients. But with a much higher price point, the city’s working class, along with the thousands upon thousands of restaurants and street carts that define this city, would continue to rely

On Khlong Toei; a divide that still continues to the present, and for both the city’s cooks and the market vendors, an existential battle to maintain a way of life. (Speaking Thai) For the restaurants and street carts in Bangkok, there’s no replacing Khlong Toei market.

Ordering from grocery stores instead would mean less selection, and in most cases, lower quality. Most significantly it would mean higher prices- which would have a knock-on effect across the entire economy. Bangkok is a city that attracts migrants and immigrants, because no matter what happens, you probably won’t starve.

If you’re in the middle-class, the incredible affordability of really good food means that you have more money to save, to buy a house, to start a business. And that’s not just if you cook at home- there are literally Michelin meals in this city that you can still have for a dollar.

The financial market isn’t ready for a big jump in prices, and if a street food vendor were suddenly faced with a massive increase, they’d have two choices. First, raise their own prices and risk closure, or second, buy inferior products.

One of the reasons Thai food is so famous worldwide is that most local vendors have no reason not to use the fresh and high-quality ingredients. Why would you cut corners when a few cents at this market can buy literally kilos of stuff straight from the farm?

As the sun begins to set and the day turns to evening, the customers at Khlong Toei are mostly not from restaurants, they’re everyday people who might work during the day and are off to feed a family, or maybe mom called and said she needs you to pick something up

On the way over, or pretty much any reason anyone would need to go grocery shopping. They’re buying some of the world’s best ingredients and because of that- even for the city’s blue-collar workers, tonight they’ll eat better than almost anyone.

It’s almost unimaginable for something like this to exist in so much the modern world. I wonder how many of the people buying their daily groceries realize how lucky they are to be able to take a place like this for granted. (Music Playing) Filming in an intersection in Khlong Toei

In the middle of the market is not the best idea I’ve ever had- you’d think nine hours into this shoot I’d understand that I’m the one who’s making problems for everybody and being in the way. It’s 7 PM, the sun is just setting, and the market has changed.

All of this- this is the main alley, this is where we started our shoot, this was fruit-and-vegetable vendors, now it’s street food all around, the whole neighborhood has come out and descended on the market for their evening meal, and we are joined by our good friend Bangkok Pat,

Who you probably saw just a moment ago as he came in- good to see you- that’s about our third greeting we’ve stage for the camera. I know! They won’t know. Well, they will now. If you’re into Thailand’s history, you probably know this guy.

He goes by Bangkok Pat and he’s a tour guide and a YouTube host, who is about as good as it gets when it comes to diving into the stories of this city. So I reached out to Pat and asked if he had time during our 24 hours to stop by for a

Walk around, and to hopefully find out not just when the market was built- but why? (Music Playing) Khlong Toei Market was built on top of a slum in 1957, and before the actual market opened, there was still a bit of a

Market there, and there were a few communities that had moved onto the land here, and they moved them away and built what became Khlong Toei Market today. There’s a sign on the building in Thai that says 2503, which is 1960. So, all those shophouses, all these are 1957.

That was when this type of shophouse was built; the more square sort of design. Why was this needed when it was built? Was it a desire to have a bigger on-land market that was no longer on the water? We’re kind of fifty years- 1957- fifty years since we started building markets inland in

Bangkok. Well you had the port over there, stuff was coming in. With the stuff coming in through the port, obviously there were local people who thought it would be a good idea to sell stuff locally rather than big loads of fish coming in and

Going straight to hotels or other markets, why not set something up here and then a lot of smaller restaurants can come here? And of course, people could come shopping here. So- and it just became huge.

There used to be a canal that ran from Khlong Phra Khanong all the way down to Hua Lamphong. It’s cut off here now, the Khlong Hua Lamphong. And that used to go all the way alongside Rama IV, and it’s interesting because I’m

Trying to think of how things would have worked when they built this in 1957, and then they filled that canal in in 1959. But I’m thinking if they didn’t fill it in, there would have been loads of boats along

That canal, because I’ve got old pictures of it with loads of boats heading down to- is that the same footprint as Rama IV? Yeah? The canal? Yeah, it went right alongside the canal, and then it joined the Krung Kasem canal at Hua Lamphong.

And because they actually opened- there used to be a wet market in Hua Lamphong at the other end of this canal. And I was thinking, how would that work, if there were loads of boats going up and down, were they retailers? They would have been selling stuff. Or private citizens?

Yeah, so that was 1957 to 1960. So, from the way you’re describing it, it sounds like this was relatively informal until 1960 when you see that sign that says the building was built. So when this was built in 1957 it wouldn’t have looked like this big metropolis of a market.

No, the second wave of modernization was the ‘50s, the population grew massively. All these shophouses that look like these are 1957 to 1959. The squarish design, looking a bit ragged. Then in the ‘60s, you have the ones with the stripey- it’s a bit nerdy, but that’s my p***, alright? – (Title Cards)

(Music Playing) By 10 o’clock at night, most of Bangkok’s 14 million residents are at home, watching TV, reading a book, or already in bed, getting rested for work the next morning. Tourists and revelers are packing the bar districts in Nana and Khao San Road, throwing

Down one too many shots and making bad decisions, and here at Khlong Toei- well it’s a different world, its own city within a city transitioning to perhaps the most important time of the day. The turnaround is something incredible. It’s not a continuation of the previous day- it’s a total reinvention. A rebirth.

Entirely new corridors come to life seemingly out of nowhere- while the busiest alleys from just a few minutes ago wait for the cleaners to come scrub the ground and collect the trash. It looks and feels completely different and somehow exponentially more exciting.

At night time the day workers after their long shifts have a chance to unwind- to have some street food or shoot a game of pool. Fresh ingredients arrive in an endless parade of trucks and delivery cars and the customers

Are no longer the average local- this is now the beginning of the market meant for chefs. If you want to find high quality Thai ingredients, you can come here anytime. But if want the rarest produce, the most fascinating seasonal items and the very freshest meats

And seafood, well this is when you start heading over. And in a city with 179 restaurants in the Michelin guide, an estimated 320,000 other restaurants and half a million street carts…well it’s a paradise for cooks to browse the stalls and aisles for things most of us might not even know exist.

One of those Michelin chefs is Riley Sanders of Bangkok’s legendary Canvas. His restaurant has been called one of the most exciting up-and-coming venues on the planet- somewhere between art and cuisine and whose 22-course tasting menu was without question the best fine dining experience I’ve had in the city.

Chef Riley isn’t just a fan of the late-night version of Khlong Toei Market. He’s such a fan that it was actually his idea- all the way back in 2022 when I told him I wanted to start a YouTube channel- for us to make exactly this video. So alright.

The genesis of the idea of doing this video altogether- I have a spreadsheet that I keep at home of ideas for videos, and slowly they come off the board and we get around to it. This is a weird backdrop by the way, the chickens all going crazy, welcome to Khlong Toei.

Riley, Chef, thank you so much for doing this. Happy to be here. We are a year and a half into the channel, and this has been on my list for a year and a half, and we’re finally doing it tonight. And this is really one of my favorite places in Bangkok.

I love this market, I used to come here every single day for five years, the first five years I lived here, and I used to get ingredients for the restaurant, learn about the seasonality, and I don’t come here that often anymore, but it’s good to be back, and let’s walk

Around and see what we can find. Yeah, lead the way. (Music Playing) These are kind of cool over here, this looks like some celtuce. I don’t think that I’ve seen it at Khlong Toei before so I’m kind of eyeing that over here, I want to pick that up and see what we’ve got.

I don’t know the Thai name- (speaking Thai). There was one time back when I was around 25 when I found myself in a village in rural China. There was one other American guy staying out there and we met for a beer and I noticed the bar had a ping pong table.

So I asked if he wanted to play. As I grabbed a paddle and got ready to win a couple of games he reached into his backpack, took out- I’m not making this up- a gold-embroidered ping pong case, brought out his monogrammed

Paddle and proceeded to beat me so badly the girls in the bar started laughing. It’s a feeling that’s hard to describe but it’s not that different from walking around Khlong Toei market in the middle of the night with Chef Riley.

We’re around the same age, we come from similar places and we’re both career chefs- but when it comes to exploring Thailand’s obscure ingredients…let’s be honest- this is his game and all I can do is try to keep up and hope nobody starts laughing. Sour plums? These are jujubes. Jujubes, yeah.

And we use these on a dish with pork belly. What are these? These are Mayom. That’s the name, these are sour (vendors laughing). We would call this “Climbing Wattle”, that’s actually probably the most specific, but it’s in the Acacia family. In the Acacia family, sure. What is this? These are Sesbania flowers.

(Adam laughing) You say that as if I should be like, ah yeah, Sesbania flowers. (Music Playing) All of these ingredients that you find if you’re lucky, in a culture without wet markets, if we didn’t have this, what incentive do farmers have to continue growing these niche ingredients that maybe don’t have a mass

Market? That’s a big reason why we wanted to come here also is we want to find these rare ingredients that are underappreciated, and find some uses for them. And if this market wasn’t here, I don’t know where we’d find them. I’m not sure if they’d have a place they could be sold.

Even right below you, these are all things that are relatively well-known in Thailand, but somebody watching this overseas probably wouldn’t have seen any of these. So let’s start with this one real quick, if you can just tell me what we’re looking at. These guys are White Popinac seeds, is the name in English.

They’re a little funky, they’re kind of like Stink Bean in a way. And occasionally these can be toasted, a chef was telling me he toasts these in a pan until they get crispy, and they’re super aromatic. It’s not just the rare ingredients that attracts people like Riley to the market during

The overnight hours. There’s a soul- something hard to put into words, but it feels like you’re part of an exclusive fraternity. If you know, you know. It’s still chaotic but somehow the community part of the community market seems so much more obvious in the middle of the night.

Maybe it’s because most customers no longer have to rush to get back to a restaurant or get home to feed the family- so they can take their time. Maybe it’s the weather cooling down or the festive atmosphere from the people letting loose after a long day but it’s different- that’s for sure.

There might be a hierarchy when it comes to the workers, but after midnight, it doesn’t matter. Whether you’re a 3rd generation vendor or a migrant from another country- everyone’s the same over a post-shift beer or a glass of Ya Dong- the theoretically legal grain

Spirit that’s allegedly medicinal, and tastes…well it tastes like what might happen if you distill a gym locker room. Cheers. Cheers. I’m not sure if it’s a sipper or a chug. It smells- (drinks) yeah, that’s exactly what it smells like. It’s not bad! Don’t do what I did. That was aggressive.

(Music Playing) I stayed in a hostel the first time I was in Thailand. And this was like, super- five dollars a night or something like that. And I asked the receptionist at the hostel, who was the owner, I was like, I’m a chef, and I came here for food.

I want to learn about Thai food and I need to know where to go. And she was like, well the place you really need to go is Talad Khlong Toei. Khlong Toei Market, of course. And I said, “where’s that?”

And she was like, well you’ll have to take a taxi, and she was trying to explain to me how to go here and all that, this was the first morning- the first time that I came

To Thailand after I woke up in the morning and was like, where should I go, and she sent me here. And I came here at like 8 AM, and I walked around, and I was just mesmerized by it.

And it was definitely the vibrance of it, the colors and all of that, but also I would look at these ingredients and I would think, I would love to cook with these. I would love to do something with this.

A market like this is something that’s so special and so unique and so interesting that I don’t think that it’ll last forever. Like we talked about that a little bit- it makes me feel like maybe we’re stepping

Back in time in a way, because here we are in 2024 and we have this market that feels like it’s been here forever, and these are people- thousands of people- that rely on this every single day. And I wish that this is something that can continue for centuries, but I don’t think

That’s going to be reality. If this is no longer a reality, what changes? What do we lose when we lose places like this? For one, I think that we don’t have the ingredients that we have now, like we see these interesting ingredients tonight, and I’m afraid that we’re not going to see

Them anymore. I wonder what happens to the people that are working in the market, this is their livelihood and this is what they do, and where do their jobs go? Is it AI, is it something automated, is it f***** you know- it’s definitely not like

This, and I can’t predict the future but I know that what we have here is something really unique and special. By 2 AM, most of the city is asleep. Even the bars and night clubs are winding down, but at Khlong Toei, the city within a city is buzzing with activity. While some alleys are being cleaned, others are full of vendors and shopkeepers preparing

Ingredients for the next morning- I mean this is the origin point of so much of Bangkok’s food which means when you see things for sale that are handmade- well they were probably made here. This is also the time when a lot of the new stock gets delivered…when farmers send their

Trucks out for delivery and for things that are at a premium in Thailand- especially meat- well this is rush hour. As Chef Duc told us earlier, when you want to buy beef that doesn’t come from a processing

Plant, supplies are limited and so the middle of the night is when Khlong Toei sees a rush to secure the very best stuff. The beef sales here are almost like Tuna at Tsukiji- you show up on time or you miss out.

By 9 AM- the time we arrived and when we’re leaving- it’ll be far too late and the only viable option is to buy from grocery stores, the kind of places that never run out because they get stock in frozen from factory farms on the other side of the world.

The term “wet market” was coined in Singapore in 1978, a designation by the local government on paper meant to differentiate outdoor farmer centers from modern grocery stores. But the subtle meaning was clear- it was noted that the name was chosen because the ground

Is always wet- covered, according to Singaporean authorities, with fish guts, animal waste, and melted ice. Singapore in 1978 was right at the beginning of the economic wave that would propel the island into the 21st century- today the per capita income is as much as $80,000 per year, ranking in the world’s top 5.

And there’s no place in a rich, cosmopolitan country for places like this. I don’t know when society turned against the kinds of markets that had built and sustained cultures, bonded communities and made food affordable since the beginning of history,

But it happened, and soon after big box stores arrived, these markets were on the chopping block from Europe to right here in Asia. Maybe the death knell came in 1957 when a trade group financed the building of a showpiece called Supermarket USA in communist Yugoslavia, with the modern shelves stocked with boxes

Of name brand items intended to show a stark contrast with the rival country, in the middle of a famine under General Tito. Or maybe it was in 1962 at an international expo in Europe when grocery conglomerates built a literal tree out of sausages to display the abundance of their selection.

The grocery stores that would feed the planet are massive corporations. In 2023 alone Carrefour turned over 87 billion dollars in sales. Aldi generated $110 billion and Kroger topped the list at 150 billion dollars. Unless you include Wal-Mart as a grocery store, whose annual revenue topped 600 billion.

The companies that rule the world do not like competition and certainly not competition that sells at lower prices. And when these chains, food suppliers and importers leaned on cities to crack down- they found a receptive public, ready to accept without question that these places are primitive,

Dirty, uncivilized, and a news media happy to reinforce that image- I mean nothing drives ratings like an undercover camera filming some unscrupulous vendor at a wet market and anyway, the workers and shoppers here are blue-collar, working class, even immigrants, and if those people complain, nobody hears it.

They’re not the ones who get to make decisions. Never mind the fact that some of them might starve if their only choice is to buy food from a supermarket- it’s their fault for not working harder and anyway…collateral damage in the march of progress.

Somewhere society got the idea that vegetables are only safe to eat if they come wrapped in a package and sprayed with chemicals. It’s wrong, it’s backwards but by now it’s public perception. And of all the voices across the planet joining the chorus to get rid of community markets

The most frustrating are the ones fighting for animal welfare. Taking down these awful wet markets has been a cause of animal rights activists for decades and for what? If it comes in a nice package and we don’t see the carcass, does it not count?

Maybe not seeing the actual animal we’re buying lets us feel better about ourselves…avoid any feelings of guilt for our own decisions. But will shutting these places down save any lives? No- of course not- all it’ll do is speed up the end of small-scale farming and guarantee more and more meat comes from factories.

The last hope of any revival of the wet market ended in 2020 with the spread of COVID, with an origin story that’s complicated and nuanced but all anyone saw was the very first headline. Wet market. Since then, at least globally, the fight is over.

The narrative is set and it feels like something that for the first time since before the Pyramids were built, is now facing extinction in all but the poorest countries. In China, even before COVID, the government has been pushing for their removal for decades,

With the first years of Xi Jinping seeing almost all of the ancient wet markets in Beijing bulldozed to showcase what should be a civilized modern capital. Even Wuhan’s Huanan Market- where COVID appears to have spread- wasn’t really a

Community market at all- it was actually part of a conglomerate owned by a listed Real Estate company. And here in Thailand, since 1997 Khlong Toei has no longer been the largest fruit and vegetable market in the country- just the biggest one meant for the public.

Talad Thai, between Bangkok and Ayutthaya, is a clean and modern enterprise selling 15,000 tons of produce per day and it long ago replaced Khlong Toei as the main supplier to regional towns and domestic grocery stores. In other words, Khlong Toei and markets like it aren’t necessary anymore, even here.

But that doesn’t mean its loss wouldn’t be catastrophic. It’s this market- not the economy- that keeps street food prices in Bangkok so famously low. It’s this market that keeps traditions alive, keeps small-time farmers in business and keeps rare ingredients from functional extinction.

Anyway at least I can always say I had the chance to experience this one- for an entire, unforgettable 24 hours. (Title Cards) You talk about the city that never sleeps- this is certainly the market that doesn’t sleep. Like it’s five something- 5:15, 5:30, and it’s just like it’s rush hour.

It has not slowed down. I have started to realize number one, how tired I am, and number two, how badly I smell. We are now, what, twenty hours in- nineteen hours into our 24 hours here at Khlong Toei, and I smell like it.

I might have to burn these clothes before I finally walk into the house. The sun rises fast in Southeast Asia. The first rays of light appeared over the skyscrapers around 6:15, and by 6:20 it was as if we’d dropped back into the middle of the day.

Khlong Toei Market is a machine- a nonstop powerhouse that just keeps on going- and being here through all of it can be more than disorienting. Time is a flat circle. I don’t even know what that means but in my exhausted and sleep-deprived state it doesn’t even matter.

Now is not the time for high minded theories. It’s the time for coffee- and we know where we can find one vendor- exactly where we saw him yesterday. Or today. Or whenever that was. (Music Playing) Alright, so a lot of this- a lot of this has

Been something that’s been brand new to me. First experience having a proper lunch and dinner in the market, first experience having late-night food here, not my first experience having breakfast, in fact that’s something that we filmed on the channel.

Rarely do I wake up early enough or stay up late enough to take advantage of one of the best breakfast markets in the entire city, but right across the street, in what Bangkok Pat was telling us off the channel is called “New Khlong Toei Market”, Khlong Toei

Part 2- right across the street, the breakfast market, right now, before seven o’clock in the morning, this is probably the best time to come here. You can see the energy and the crowds, and that is our absolute breakfast destination. Really excited for what we’re going to find there.

This is just so much cooler than I thought it was going to be. I’ve never been here before 7 o’clock in the morning, and- are we still before 7 o’clock in the morning? 6:42. It is, like, half of these places are going to be sold out before 7.

There’s nowhere to sit so we’re going to get our usual Khanom Jeen because it’s the only place here that has tables, but what I want to point out as we’re walking past is that this is one of my favorite Southern Thai-style Khao Gaeng counters, and I usually

Come here for my fix of Pad Sataw, and I’m looking at this and I’m like, ahh, she doesn’t have Pad Sataw today, and I realize, well, we didn’t see Sataw beans in the market, because it’s not in season, and it makes sense that of course we don’t see it here,

Because we don’t see it there! And you start thinking about how interconnected all this stuff is, and how the ingredients that are fresh are what you find there, and if you’re not finding it there, then the best restaurants aren’t going to use it, because this is where they’re doing their shopping!

Especially here, where we’re basically attached to the market. But it’s so interesting to start- I’m sure if we looked for some of the things that we did find, like Riley was pointing out yesterday the Acacia leaves when we were walking around

With him, and that’s something that you see in this very first dish right here. And it’s like, what’s fresh and what’s in season right now? And now, if it’s there, it’s here, and I guess that’s the rule for pretty much all of Bangkok. (Music Playing) It’s about 7 o’clock in the morning, breakfast

Time, we have now seen pretty much every corner of the market, I would imagine we’ve seen every corner but I keep being surprised by different things, and, yeah, what an evolution! It’s kind of come full circle, where it’s starting to look like it did when we first

Arrived yesterday, but in between, we saw two or three complete cycles where everything would move and change and new things would come in, and customers would change, vendors would change, the entire spirit would change, but the one thing that didn’t change is that it has stayed busy all throughout. I am just broken.

24 hour shoot sounded great on paper, like, let’s see what this market’s like for 24 hours. But what I didn’t anticipate is how I was personally going to feel and smell after 24 hours in the market.

I got a little bit of time left to go, but for now, let’s eat their version of the same meal that we started with with Chef Duc. Mmm. There’s just such a soul here at this market, like it’s a really unique and special place,

And you have to look at it in three dimensions. I don’t think I would have understood or appreciated this place without seeing it all at once, being here and watching how- because we’re going to go home. When this is over, after we finish eating, we’re going to do another walk-through,

We’ve got a little bit of time left to go, and then we’re going to go home. But the market continues. This 24-hour, nonstop, crazy cycle- that doesn’t stop just because we leave. If we came back here in the evening, we would see the same thing we saw today. Maybe. I don’t know.

Or something different. And it’s just these cycles that continue and continue and continue. The vegetable seller yesterday who told us she works 365 days a year. There are no breaks, there’s no, like, “Sunday we close, everybody rests!” This is the market that feeds the city.

It can’t stop, because if it stops, Bangkok stops. And I think that’s the biggest wild takeaway for me, it’s that when I leave and go home, I’m the only one! Well, with Boris. Everybody else is still here, and they just have another day of all of this, and the cycle

Continues over and over again, and it’s just- it’s really hard to wrap your mind around. It’s just such an intense experience that- again, we get to go home, take a shower, decompress, and start writing and editing this video, but the people who are here who are just setting

Up for their day, or just breaking down from their overnight- it’s just, now, on to the next day, on to the next day. Where are we sourcing the next stuff from? How do we set up our cart tomorrow? Maybe they’re over at the pool hall after their shift.

A lot of people are probably here right now, taking food home to go feed their families. I mean, it’s really unbelievable when you think about the scale of how something like this can go on, day in and day out, 365 days a year, for the last 67 years. It’s just unreal. It’s unreal.

This is truly my favorite place in Bangkok. And I tell that to people even when they come to the restaurant, they’re like “where do you like to go on your day off, and where do you like to go hang out?”

And I’m not saying to go to, like, the big new mall, or to go watch a movie, or to a new bar, or something like that. I say my favorite place in Thailand is Khlong Toei. (Speaking Thai) They’ll never go away, it’s impossible.

You can’t sanitize this and bring it indoors, it wouldn’t be the same. I think part of coming here is the chaos, and the sounds, and the noise, and the cats and the dogs and the kids running around barefoot… (Title Card) 24 hours in Khlong Toei Market. Oh, God. I just blinked, and my eyes didn’t even want to open again. Going to sleep. Subscribe to the channel for more from OTR. Thank you so much to those who support us on Patreon it really helps to keep us going.

Find the links below for our Patreon and Social Media and we’ll see you soon. Coconut milk, next to laundry detergent, next to peanut brittle, next to dish soap, and what looks like a THC-infused chicken bouillon powder. Welcome to Khlong Toei.