Bug Cart, Khao San Road, Bangkok

I love Bangkok. Where else can you find a transvestite selling deep-fried scorpions and giant cockroaches for tourist consumption? Consumption as in food, for people.

Khao San Road is famous as the world's backpacker mecca. Hardcore travelers lament that Khao San Road is now a big sell-out, long past its good old days of flea-bag hotels, drugs, and legends. So yeah it is, but you can still find everything you used to, and more. It's probably the most international block in the world. Travelers unload souveniers and trade stories collected from all corners of the world. You can buy Dutch disco CDs, African drums, Guatemalan hats, and Chinese opium pipes.

You can also buy a selection of snacks from a bug cart. Crickets of various sizes, large black scorpions, meal worms, and large water bugs. But the timing never seemed right. The carts seem to appear at odd hours, so after a few days of disappointment, I'd given up on eating the bugs.

I certainly saw a few critters at our hotel. We had a few in-room geckos that were feasting on little bugs but they refused to share with us.

Then I saw her. As we were carving into a blackened catfish on a sidewalk table, an old lady rolled by with a cart of fried bugs. I got up a few minutes later to seek her out but she had vanished into the night. I was sad for 2 days and had given up all hope. Then, last night, as we were finishing up our final Pad Thai before going to bed, another cart rolled up: BUGS! The vendor, a flamboyant transvestite, was excited to help me choose the bug course. It was oddly reminiscent of ordering from a cheese cart at a fancy restaurant. Anyway, I got a small scoop of each bug, 8 of them all togother. All the bugs were deep fried and sprinkled with a pepper. We ordered a few of each and sat down on the curb to analyze the taste and texture of each. Here's a photo, set next to a Singha Beer can for size demonstration.



Here's a list:

Black scorpion. Poked my lip with the stinger on accident but ate the rest of the tail in two bites. Flavorless.

Big grasshopper. Tasted grassy like some Savignon Blanc's do. Not bad.

Malengdaa water bug. Looks like a giant cockroach. This is the bug they grind into chili paste in Thailand. We picked up a small bottle of it at 7-11. Bug jam at 7-11. Anyway, the one I had wasn't very exciting. But the most difficult to place in my mouth, to be honest.

2 kinds of maggots. These were my favorites. One tasted like almonds, the other was juicy and sweet.

Crickets. Crunchy, tasted like potato chips. I could chow down on these next baseball game.

The rest were small, undefinable, maybe other kinds of crickets, or merely legs and antennii.