99 Baht All you can eat in Bangkok

Hot.  From the food to the weather, Bangkok is hot.  It is a city for the senses, extremes of every kind around every corner.  Those of you that have been here can understand what I mean.  I have spent 3 days so far in this gluttonous haven, this place that assaults the senses in every turn.  I am still trying to absorb and digest everything from the unrelenting traffic and food vendors to last night’s dinner.  The combination of the heat plus air pollution is damn oppressive, it weighs down on me and I feel very tired at the end of the day.  Maybe it’s something I need to get used to.  But I digress; what I really want to write about today is last night’s dinner.  My friend Nir (who I have embarked on this Asian voyage with) and I ate at a 99 Baht all-you-can-eat restaurant, which is about $4 American.  This was a place that pretty much sums up Bangkok as a whole: crowded, loud and masses of food.  The theme of the restaurant was a combination of Korean Barbeque and Japanese ShabuShabu.  ShabuShabu is thinly sliced meat usually pork or beef that you poach at the table in a heated metal contraption with a stock or dashi as the poaching liquid.  Korean Barbeque is thinly sliced meat usually beef and is grilled at the table on small grills.  This 99 Baht place of culinary debauchery was a combination of the two.  It was a small grill on top of hot coals with a ring around the grill with water, for poaching or drinking.  You place pieces of pork fat on the grill and let it run off into the water, along with whatever else you are cooking on the grill or poaching in the water.  Eventually the water becomes almost like a soup, Nir seemed to love drinking it, me not so much.  There are about 50 different cuts of meat and poultry, bacon and sausages; you can have anything from whole shrimp and tiny clams to beef liver, marinated pieces of chicken or stomach lining.  There were a few foreigners scattered here and there in the gigantic monstrosity, but for the most part it seemed to be the place to go with your family or groups of friends, I even saw a couple cut-rate dates taking place.  The sweltering heat from the city mixed with the warmth of the grills and humidity from the river was an experience on it’s own.  Sweating, grilling, eating; a really appetizing combo.  But nevertheless we ate, oh and did we eat, we ate our share plus that of probably a small village, dipping meats and other parts of animals into a variety of different sauces and chili vinegars.  Fish balls and sausages galore!  They also serve desert, traditional Thai deserts like sticky rice and ice cream or strangely unnatural sweet jellies that were made with so many chemicals they could probably survive a nuclear blast or five.  It was a gigantic restaurant right next to the river that runs through the city and I couldn’t help but wonder just how fresh the seafood was…  But seriously everything looked fresh and was kept chilled, I felt pretty safe eating for the most part.  The place was lit up like a stadium and amongst the multitude of families and friends eating in the place there was an even brighter lit stage at the head of the restaurant with a man and a woman enthusiastically singing throughout the night.  They looked like real pros with their number and email address advertising the duo hanging up behind them painted on a blue tarp.  Their play list consisted of a Thai rap and r&b song or ten, some kind of romantic soft rock tunes and even a few cover songs like Hotel California (I think), all sung in Thai of course.  After we finished stuffing our gobs we rolled ourselves back to the hotel in awe of the whole experience and a slight feeling of repulsion from the sheer amounts of animal flesh we not only saw but consumed as well.  I recommend seeing this place to any meat loving person who happens to stop in Bangkok for night out.  But be prepared to eat, sweat and be awed.