Sen Lek Naam!

As Paul mentions in the description section of this blog, one of our main goals when we set out on this trip was to find a particular bowl of noodles, known as sen lek naam. When we were living in Bangkok back in 2002, the moment when we figured out how to order noodles from the street stands was the point when we began to feel we were regaining some sort of control over our lives. Noodles became a routine. Every night, after a traumatic day in the classroom and a long, sweaty commute home, we would take showers and then walk down to the noodle stand on the corner of our street to order sen lek naam (which literally translates as small (thin) rice noodles with water), then we would eat our noodles sitting on plastic chairs on the sidewalk, still sweating but temporarily content. At 20 baht (50c) a bowl, it helped us stick to our impossibly strict budget and save for our eventual travels. It also gave us a sense of being home, even if we never really settled in to life in Bangkok.

On paper, sen lek naam doesn't sound like anything special. It basically consists of noodles in chicken broth with coriander and a random, and always different, assortment of unidentified lumps of meat. That mostly explains why there's no English translation and you won't find it on the menus in restaurants that cater to Westerners. You never quite know what you're going to get, and depending on which noodle stand you order from your soup could contain pork, fish balls, or some kind of crunchy bready stuff that soaks up the broth and makes the soup taste extra delicious. You could also end up with some gross eel type thing that makes you want to throw up, but the risk is part of the fun. But the best thing about sen lek naam is the DIY element. The soup itself isn't particularly flavorful so you have to add your own flavor from the four little pots on the table containing fish sauce, chillies, red pepper, and sugar. The skill is getting to know exactly how much of each to add so you can make it taste just right without too much trial and error.

I think Paul and I began to fetishize sen lek naam precisely because it was the only kind of Thai food that was impossible to find in New York. After searching in vain for years, we discovered one restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens, that had sen lek naam on the menu, so we began making the hour long pilgrimage to Queens at least once a month to get our noodles and nostalgia fix.

So of course, the first thing we did when we arrived back in Bangkok was to seek out sen lek naam. We took the boat along the Chao Praya river to Chinatown and walked up from there to Wongwien Yee Sip Song ("traffic circle 22," which is how we eventually learned to identify the random neighborhood where we lived), and were ridiculously excited to discover our old noodle stand, exactly where we remembered it on the corner just down the road from our apartment, still serving exactly the same noodles with only a 10 baht price increase. Our sen lek naam was as good as we remembered, and coupled with the nostalgic thrill of exploring our old neighborhood and retracing our old bus commutes to work, we were giddy for the rest of the day.

We managed to eat sen lek naam--through not from that same noodle stand--every day for lunch and sometimes for dinner too during our week in Bangkok, but now that we're at the beach there are nothing but tourist restaurants so we may have to wait until we get back to Queens to taste our favorite noodles again.