Hidden gem on a Bangkok back street

Khua Kling Pak Sod is a regionally specific restaurant, focused on home cooking of the southern district of Tah Sae.

Tom yum platu, or sour mackerel broth with lots of fresh chilli Picture: John Lethlean

The Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants awards are about a certain kind of restaurant. Trained staff; well-stocked cellars; designer decor; name-brand chefs. They will never be about places such as Khua Kling Pak Sod.

And that’s a good thing.

It’s the Monday night before the awards, and instead of steering me towards something smart, media savvy and on the up, my friend Dallas Cuddy, a Bangkok-based Australian chef, suggests “something you’d never find out about unless it was introduced to you”.

He’s playing matchmaker.

Khua Kling Pak Sod is a regionally specific restaurant, focused on the home cooking of the southern district of Tah Sae in Chumphon. It’s a reasonably elegant sort of place, and they do have a menu in English, not that anyone there speaks it. And that’s about where the compromise starts and ends.

Southern Thai food is renowned as the country’s hottest; I have never seen such liberal use of fresh chilli — baby reds, baby greens. This is not food for the faint-hearted.

But what food.

A clear, sour fish broth with mackerel (tom yum platu) is outrageously good and speckled with fresh red scud chillis. Minced pork stir-fried (khua kling moo sab) with turmeric and lime leaf (among many things) is livened up with whole green chillis the size of an ant. Navigate carefully.

And the kanom jeen nam ya pu — a yellow curry with beautiful chunks of fresh crabmeat and betel leaves, served with vermicelli — is the best such dish I have tasted. Such balance, and remorseless flavour.

Lettuce stir-fried with whole garlic cloves and fish sauce turns out to be a wonderful side dish; and riceberry — a new hybrid variety of rice bred in Thailand — is a first for me: nutty, texturally quite different to jasmine or glutinous rice, and purple-ish in colour.

With five craft beers from Phuket, plus GST, our bill is about $75, the memory, as the credit card ad goes, priceless. It might just be Asia’s best restaurant.