Crouching on a tiny stool at Baan Phadthai in the riverside district of Bang Rak, with the hot air coaxing sweat from every pore, there’s only one thing to do: order a mango juice soda, fast. Then it’s the main event – pad Thai. I opt for the jumbo mud crab version, enough for two, and it arrives with the ingredients separated into neat piles. Chopped peanut and chilli, a tangle of bean sprouts, a cheek of lime and the chewy noodles hiding under a hollow, blush-coloured crab shell. Add sour tamarind sauce and shovel it in.

Not only is chef Supaksorn “Ice” Jongsiri one of the most likeable figures in Bangkok’s dining scene, he’s also one of the most committed to uplifting Thai cuisine, its singular ingredients and producers. In 2018, when he first opened this exquisite restaurant in a century-old frangipani-framed mansion in Sukhumvit in the city centre, Chef Ice had to build those relationships from scratch. “Many of the farmers who grew the ingredients had wanted to change their farms to grow rubber or palm oil,” he says. But with the chef’s support, they continued growing and gathering the produce that makes Sorn such a considered deep-dive into southern Thai gastronomy, including dishes made with rare crabs from Phuket and sugar palm from the Ban Bang Toei region.

When a Bangkok hole-in-the-wall eatery only does one thing, you can be pretty sure it does it well. Jok Prince (1391 Charoen Krung Road, Silom, Bang Rak; +668 1916 4390), a tiny hideaway of plastic chairs and tables in Chinatown, serves creamy rice porridge studded with plump pork balls and a scattering of fragrant julienned ginger and spring onion. The secret ingredient I discover, as I dig in with a Fanta-orange plastic spoon, is smokiness infused into the rice gruel as it’s wok-tossed over sizzling charcoal by the all-female chef line-up. The balance is as tight as a well-tuned violin string: the comfort of the rice, the sweetness of the pork, the tang of ginger and the soft waft of smoke. It’s one of the city’s great Chinese-influenced dishes.

A pair of identical twins serving German food in the middle of the steaming Thai concrete jungle? Weird on paper, delicious on the plate. The dining room at Sühring, run by brothers Thomas and Mathias Sühring in the Yan Nawa district, is all soft-toned timbers and vases of neat ranunculus, while through the windows I can see the juxtaposition of thick tropical palms. The tasting menu is a knot of tight technique, from the nubs of butter coloured the red, yellow and black of the German flag to the tiny rolled log of roast beef, no bigger than a Matchbox car. The dish that makes me smile (and then sigh with delight) is a tiny, latticed wafer sandwiching smooth duck liver and served in a wrapper that makes it resemble a child’s biscuit.

As I climb the stairs to this somewhat surprising restaurant on a dark night in Sukhumvit, I’m greeted by bursts of Backstreet Boys and Faith No More blasting from chef Gaggan Anand’s eponymous fine-diner on the building’s ground floor. One flight up and I’m at his comparatively sedate creation, Ms. Maria and Mr. Singh, which celebrates a fictional romance between a Mexican woman and an Indian man. For the most part, the East Asian half of the equation sits separately from the Central American part so that one minute I’m digging into Kerala fish curry and the next picking up zingy adobo tacos. The through-line that ties these seemingly disparate cuisines together is spice and an unwavering intensity of flavour.

A mainstay on every restaurant awards list in Asia and beyond, this high energy but laidback spot in Bang Rak is among the best places to try one of Thailand’s most treasured ingredients, the giant river prawn. Beneath a ceiling artwork of thousands of tiny glass tubes filled with indigenous spices and rice (above left), I’m served the prawn as part of chef ThiTid “Tonn” Tassanakajohn’s tasting menu. Sourced from Songkhla Lake in the south and the size of a small lobster, it’s smothered in tom yum curry and plated alongside an oblong of black rice salad studded with pork belly and crowned with a flurry of chilli and alliums. “Mix it together like a tartare,” Chef Tonn tells me, and before long my plate is a Jackson Pollock of sauce and spice.

The first thing I notice on a stroll through the narrow streets of the historic and relatively under-visited area of Kudi Chin on the west bank of the Chao Phraya River is the melting pot of religions. Doors are hung with tinselly Christmas decorations year-round while, elsewhere, Muslim street vendors cook up cumin-scented beef skewers while their Buddhist neighbours grill pork a few streets along. The tiny wooden-walled Baan Sakulthong has framed portraits of the Pope on some walls, Buddhist calendars on others, and serves food that dates back to the arrival of 18th-century Portuguese traders. The owner, matriarch Kanittha Sakulthong, brings out a multi-course meal of rice buns shaped like flowers and ducks, followed by a Portuguese-ish take on kanom jeen or fermented rice noodles. Normally eaten with fish curry, here they’re made with minced chicken offal and red curry, said to be a take on bolognese that reminded the Portuguese of their European roots.

“Or Tor Kor Market is a place I fall in love with every time I visit,” says chef Pam Pichaya Soontornyanakij from acclaimed Bangkok Chinatown restaurant Potong. This busy wet market (101 Kamphaeng Phet Road, Chatuchak), right near the more popular Chatuchak weekend market, displays some of the most luscious and high-quality produce anywhere in the capital. I admire the stacks of glistening river fish and bite into bitter snake fruit before heading to the adjacent food court, where Chef Pam orders us plates of smoky pad Thai, satay and seasonal fruit, followed by a helping of her favourite kao kaa moo – cinnamon and anise-braised pork knuckle with rice. I wrap sai ua – a richly flavoured curry sausage from the north – into little parcels with basil and lettuce, and tear into the gooey, crisp-edged fried mussel omelette that gives the city’s popular crab version a run for its money.

Things to Do in Bangkok's Coolest Neighbourhood