The Story of Tom Yum: Thailand's Most Misunderstood (and Probably Oldest) Dish

This is Tom Yum soup. It's one of the top two most popular Thai foods on earth, at least according to internet searches. But order Tom Yum in Thailand, and what you might be served could look more like this. Or this. Or any of these. And yet, they're all Tom Yum. Which overseas might mean one thing, but here represents an entire category. One where chefs mix and match ingredients to fit their own palate, and where the deeper you dive, the more you understand a totally unique flavor, technique, and of course, history. So today, to tell that story, we're traveling across Bangkok, visiting famous restaurants, waiting in endless lines, and drowning ourselves, almost literally, in the best and oldest versions of Tom Yum soup. No matter what today we consider ethnic cuisine, it's probably an outcome of centuries of trade and migration. Like pizza, unequivocally Italian but actually derived from an ancient Persian flatbread with cheese. Filipino adobo is just a variation of a Portuguese stew, which is also the root of Indian vindaloo. And here on the channel, we've covered things like Ethiopian doro wad, heavily inspired by India, and even the classic American fried chicken, actually from West Africa and Scotland. That's just how the world works. War and conquest, trade and migration have pinballed techniques and ingredients back and forth until everything, if you look hard enough, well it comes from somewhere else. Food is global, it's what ties us together and shows the course of human movement and interaction. Except, before all that movement started, before the establishment of early empires, before the Silk Road and the Age of Exploration, well there were people, and there was food. And sometimes, researching a dish, you end up going so far back in time that you get all the way back to the beginning. True culinary dinosaurs made a certain way thousands of years ago, and still right there, where they started. Usually, these ancient dishes are hidden in old villages and deep in family recipes, but every once in a while, it's right out there in the open. And that brings us to Tom Yum Soup. Today, it's a worldwide Thai restaurant staple, a dish that's taken on a life of its own since it was first discovered by the tourists who came to Thailand after the Vietnam War. Even here in the country, it's often seen as a foreign Thai dish, something like Pad Thai and fried spring rolls. But following the story of Tom Yum, well we find something that opens up an entire forgotten category. One that, in the very first days here, defined local cuisine and showcased tastes and flavors that are truly endemic to this region. And to find that story, well we begin on the street where tourists first encountered the dish. A place known in Bangkok as Tom Yum Alley, just steps away from Khao San Road. On a street in Bangkok's Old Town, right next to a market that long ago sold prawns straight from the river, a half dozen vendors make their versions of Tom Yum Kung, or Tom Yum with shrimp. These versions run the gamut of tastes and flavors, but they're all centered around these enormous prawns, and especially one secret component. It's head, it's shrimp head. It's the best part of the shrimp. This is something that I never think to order, Tom Yum soup. For whatever reason, I just consider this to be a foreigner Thai dish. Even more so than Pad Thai, to where it just never crosses my mind at a restaurant, unless we have guests who are coming in from out of town. Ah, a couple. Unless we have guests from out of town, there's very few times that I would find myself ordering Tom Yum soup. But I don't really know why. I just kind of got it in my head a while ago that that was fine, you know. And as cynical as introduction was, this is actually pretty good. Tom Yum Alley is about 300 meters away from Khaosan Road, the center of Thailand's backpacking culture, and where a lot of foreign knowledge of Thai food actually comes from. Now when Khaosan first saw tourists, actually more recently than you might think in 1982, Thai food was still largely unknown on the world stage. And for the first visitors, before all the big restaurants would open and Pad Thai vendors set up shop, well to find something to eat, they'd have to explore the neighborhood. And back then, this alley, specializing in Tom Yum Goong, or Tom Yum with Shrimp, well it was the closest food street to Khaosan. It's crazy to imagine coming here without any prior knowledge or context of what you might find, and encountering stuff that looked like this. At Mam Tom Yum, the recipe starts with prawns from the Chao Phraya, so big you could throw them through a window. There's Nam Prik Pao, or chili paste, and fresh red chili peppers. Then kaffir lime juice, fermented fish sauce, sugar, and a splash of milk. Real milk, not the coconut variety. For flavor and texture, there's lemongrass, galangal, young coconut shoots, cilantro, holy basil, and mushrooms. And all of it, in a broth made from staggering quantities of what's called shrimp fat or shrimp butter, but is actually the prawn's hepatopancreas, the digestive gland inside the head. If you're counting, that's 14 ingredients, not including the contents of the homemade chili paste. But right next door, at another old street cart on this same alley, well the dish is something completely different. At Tom Yum Ban Lam Phu, just behind a plastic curtain from Mam Tom Yum, here the dish uses just half as many ingredients as their neighbor next door. In a broth of water seasoned with pandan, there's prawns and their hepatopancreas, lemongrass, mushrooms and coconut shoots, lime juice, and a few minced chilies. These dishes have completely different tastes and textures, different levels of heat and sourness, and the only thing they really have in common is that along with these massive shrimp, they taste just perfect. And that's the point. Tom Yum, as it's best known today, is a soup that brings a lot of flavors into balance and does make something uniquely special. But here on this alley, it's decidedly a shrimp soup. And all the vendors, not just the two that we sampled, well their recipes are their own creations or family traditions of how to best season a bowl of prawns, especially highlighting the stuff from the head which in an ancient diet would have been extremely beneficial, but also in need of a lot of flavor to cover up the funk. In a way, it's ironic that the same alley where Tom Yum was first introduced to Bangkok's tourists, we can see perfect examples of how different the dish was in bygone days. And following that story… well, that takes us back further than we've ever gone on OTR. To the very beginning of real endemic Thai food. Before the Chinese arrived with their stir fries, the Indians with curries, and a hundred other cultures with a thousand techniques and ingredients, well for the people native to the Thai riverlands, there were soups, there was seafood from the river, and there were native herbs and produce. Things like kaffir lime, galangal, lemongrass, and straw mushrooms. Back in the earliest days of Southeast Asia, according to archaeologists, the most common technique for cooking was boiling in a big pot. And that would mean taking whatever could be hunted, caught, or trapped and cooking it together with foraged plants. Now we don't know exactly when the local people started making stuff like this here, but we do have a pretty good idea why. Because it's more or less the same story with the origin of almost everything everywhere. Without vitamins and supplements and access to grocery stores, it was necessary to maximize nutritional value, and that would mean using every part of an animal, including stuff that can taste a little bit challenging, like shrimp hepatopancreas. So the stuff that tasted good, lime leaves, lemongrass, things like that, well they'd be added to the pot to mask the funky flavors. The metaphorical spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. Anyway, it is possible that given the prevalence of Chao Phraya river shrimp, there might have been soups thousands of years ago that looked a lot like this. However, that would have been for special occasions, because in the days before refrigeration, meat would generally have to be preserved, dried, or smoked to avoid quick spoilage. If you were lucky enough to have something fresh, you'd just grill it and eat. Soups with herbs were for the not-so-good stuff. So, to imagine what the earliest versions of tom yum might have looked like, we can picture something very simple. Native ingredients boiled in water along with dried meat or fish from the river. And as it happens, well that is pretty much the exact recipe of a soup that happens to be considered the oldest surviving dish of the Chao Phraya basin. A soup very much like tom yum, by the name of tom klong. You know, the things that were influenced by the Chinese, or by Indians, or Lao, or Khmer, or the Mon people, or anything else, you know, over the course of all these years of history, that really finding the stuff that's endemic to here, the actual authentic central Thai food that was here before all the people arrived, you know, that's this. You can't tell the story of tom yum without tasting tom klong. Today considered a separate dish, but really it has its own marquee origins. Its name, for example, today is often translated as tom klong or canal soup, but it's actually tom klong, which in context doesn't mean anything and is said to derive from an ancient word used to describe a soup like this. Anyway, tom klong today is classically made from tamarind, galangal, lemongrass, and shallot, in this case with a couple slices of tomato, some sawtooth coriander, and two chili peppers, and the main protein is dried and preserved fish from the river. It's probably, with just a few changes, the oldest surviving form of what would become today's tom yum soup. Spicy, there's like two little dried chili peppers in there. It's so comforting. It's a lot of flavor. It's so simple, but again, you can see how over the years it's become a game of addition, just keep adding stuff, you know, new ingredients with some more flavors, throw it in the soup, right? This is not a Thai-Chinese, Thai-Indian, Thai-Arab, Thai-Lao, Thai-Burmese, this is nothing like that. This is something that the very first time anybody made this dish was here in Central Thailand, and most likely within a few miles of where we are right now, to the best of our ability to guess. Somewhere along the Chao Phraya. Somewhere along the Chao Phraya, the taste of Central Thailand in the old, old, old days. How are you still? I don't know, I had something spicy. Now, tom klong isn't the only thing still surviving in Thailand that's representative of ancient, endemic, pre-imperial era Thai food. Slightly further to the north, there's a soup called tom som, made with chicken or fish, tamarind, bilimbi, fermented juice of the nipa palm, fish sauce, shrimp paste, and shallot. Hell, inland we can even count jungle curry, which is literally the same idea, has the same ancient history, but uses non-river-based ingredients like fresh black pepper, Thai eggplant, finger root, and game meat. It's a fascinating story that opens up a lot of paths to follow. And we did have the idea of chasing that history, but then, things went sideways. We'd called a car to our next destination, but all of a sudden, the sky started getting dark. And then the rain came. The driver that picked us up was kind enough to ignore all reasonable evidence of the coming monsoon and get us at any cost to where we were going, but in a tiny hatchback that could float in a puddle, we were no match for acts of God or nature. And within minutes, downtown Bangkok was impassable, and instead of searching for bowls of soup, we found ourselves in one. We found a path of higher ground in the direction of where we'd planned to finish our shoot much later, at Chulalongkorn University. But since the day was now completely out of our hands, we decided to turn ourselves over to the Tom Yum experience and just walk around to see what we might find. And it turns out, by just wandering in the rain, searching the back pages of a whole bunch of menus and asking cooks what Tom Yums they prepare, well, we found so much more than we could have possibly imagined. I've never seen this or had this before, and this is gonna be my first bite of crispy pork cooked in Tom Yum. Is it good or good? I'm very tired and full. I mean, I can do a half-hearted one. It's very good. Yeah, I mean, it's like, of course it's gonna be delicious. You're combining a whole bunch of delicious stuff into a bowl. Oh, this is awesome. I personally would eat this ahead of with shrimp, but that's just my own palate. Oh no, absolutely. Again, everything It's good beer-drinking food. Can you? On the camera? Yeah. Well, it's, you know, you gotta maintain your elegance. Rains like cats and dogs. All right, so, sea bass and fingerroot. Fingerroot, one of my absolute favorite ingredients that we really don't use very much outside of this part of the world. So, she says if I don't want chilies, I can take them out. That makes me feel very personally hurt and offended, but all right, let's try this one. We have shallots, we have fingerroot, we have chili, we have fish. That's pretty much all I can actually see. Dory, do you want a little bit of this too? I'm fine for now. For now? You sure? It's one of the best soups I've ever tried. It is so good. All right, we're nowhere near done with tom yum, but let me quickly explain what we're actually finding. Now, by this point in our shoot, we'd tried six versions or relatives of tom yum, and not only were none of them much like the iconic overseas dish, even out of these six, no two were alike. There were soups made with river prawns, dried fish, crispy pork belly, sea bass, and pork rib. They were spicy and mild, creamy and thin, really good and… well, that describes pretty much all of them. The truth is, the diversity in the tom yum category is by design. I mean, it's right there in the name. Tom, meaning boiled, and yum, meaning mixed. Or, if you read it in context, tom yum literally translates to soup with various stuff. It seems more of a happy accident than a foregone conclusion that the soup known far and wide under the name tom yum happens to use many of the same herbs and aromatics as the probable oldest versions, as you do have to wonder, if Khao San Road hadn't existed and foreigners had arrived to a different part of Bangkok, whether another style of tom yum might be the one The first time the name tom yum appears in a Thai-language recipe was in 1888, a version based around snakehead fish and seasoned with things like unripe mango and pickled garlic juice. Nine years later, we see the first tom yum goong, similar to the clear broth version on Tom Yum Alley, except without any citrus at all, and with the ma dan fruit for sourness. Before that, there are dozens of origin stories of whatever's called tom yum, with some historians claiming it started with a Thai sailor making it on his boat heading to China in the 1300s, some saying it was made by merchants from India who brought their own versions of sour prawn soup, and others dating it to as recently as the reign of King Rama III in or around the 1830s. The truth is, all of these might be correct, since new versions of tom yum are still appearing to the present day. I mean, again, it's in the name. A soup with stuff. There's nothing in history that demands that tom yum be a combination of spicy, sour, and savory. That's just the colloquial definition, paying tribute to that incredible combination of the stuff that happens to appear naturally in the Southeast Asian riverlands. And maybe the most interesting part of the story is that if you order tom yum in Thailand today, well the most popular local version by far is one that doesn't even take its roots here at all. It's a noodle soup, brought to Thailand in the 19th century by Chinese, and using almost nothing endemic to this region. It's not spicy or sour, and it's a tom yum in name only. A combination of chili, peanuts, garlic, cilantro, and sugar, served with egg noodles and a slice of lime, and sometimes without soup at all. But by definition, both literally and in flavor profile, well it still counts as tom yum. In the past, it was a technique. Tom yum was the big umbrella term for a technique. That technique of a whole bunch of stuff in a soup is not this, right? But now tom yum has almost taken on a second meaning, which is about the flavor profile. Something that encompasses aromatic, spicy, sour, sweet. And so you can have a tom yum flavor to something that is originally coming from the Chinese kway teow noodle dishes, tom yum noodles. You can get it soup. She recommended the soup on the side to have the dry tom yum with their seasoning mix, some peanuts, chili peppers, crispy rendered pork fat. Honestly, in the pantheon of all the different tom yum dishes, we've had some amazing ones today, but this might be my favorite just for the simplicity of it. All right. Jasper. I don't do this often. You know, it's funny. This is the interesting thing about filming this today is you and I both are, and I don't want to offend anybody when I say this, not the biggest fans of tom yum. It's not something that we would choose off of a restaurant menu typically. I was curious going into the shoot today whether I would see the error of my ways. I think when we shot in Patteyat and we had that bowl of tom yum soup that Gary Butler recommended to us, that was sort of the first time for me the light went off of being like, oh, this is actually good. And it's not just something that's a foreigner restaurant staple. It's good. But the more you research what is tom yum, you start to see so much diversity in the category. What was your first overall impression of today? I always knew that tom yum had a lot of variations, right? To me, it's kind of like som tam, you know, everyone thinks about som tam thai. I guess it's kind of like the parallel. That's like the parallel of tom yum goong, right? But like there's obviously som tam pao ra and som tam korat, all that stuff, right? And I think that's the same thing with tom yum. But I think my revelation is that that recipe that came from Bandang, the one from Chulalongkorn, I didn't know tom yum kind of went all the way back there. That's really, that was my interesting thought for me. You know, so you have something spicy, you have something sour, you have something sweet, which is generally sugar, but it doesn't have to be, right? And then you have the, you know, the fatty component, which can be the shrimp head, it can be the crispy pork, you know, but whatever it is, that's the trick is not something revolutionary, it's just how well can you bring these into balance. And what we saw at these non-shrimp places was to me, every single one of them just nailed the balance, in my opinion. Yeah, I think so too. I think that nothing was like overwhelmingly in one flavor, although I guess if you had to give like one singular dominating like flavor, it would be sour, would you say? I would agree with that. Yeah, absolutely. But everything had like sweetness and saltiness. What's your biggest takeaway from today? What would that be? My biggest takeaway from today is that tom yum go actually has like deeper like history than I thought. I mean, it's definitely not... Deeper history, different flavor too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was expecting coconut, sweet, the kind of stuff that you get overseas in Thai restaurants. This was very shrimpy. Oh, what do you get overseas? What is it like? This is what the world knows as tom yum soup. It's made from a stock base, shrimp, vegetable, or chicken all acceptable, then onions, vegetables, prawns, and of course what hot Thai kitchen perfectly refers to as the trinity of tom yum, kaffir lime, lemongrass, and galangal. Then it can be optionally thickened with milk or coconut milk. Now, no matter where you are, you've probably tried it before. And by now, hopefully we've explained how this or something like it was introduced to foreigners. But there's one more part of the story, which is how it spread like wildfire and took over the world. As tourism boomed in the 1980s and 90s, so did tom yum with shrimp, growing from the streets of central Thailand and coastal fishing towns to other booming cities like Phuket and Chiang Mai. And so associated with Thailand did it become that the 1997 Asian stock market crash, which started here, was nicknamed the Tom Yum Goong Crisis. But the real explosion was yet to come. In 2002, Thailand launched the most ambitious program ever in culinary diplomacy. The government introduced a plan to promote Thai culture and tourism through restaurants. The program would be called Global Thai, and it would be the first of its kind anywhere. Under Global Thai, the government would provide loans of up to $3 million to any small business owner who wanted to open a Thai restaurant abroad. And that wasn't all. Thailand would use its tourism budget to promote Thai cuisine. Business plans and market research would be provided to entrepreneurs, and even Thai airways would be required to carry local food products at a subsidized cost on every international flight. That way, whatever these new restaurants needed from Thailand, they could get. The program was a massive success. In 2002, there were around 3,000 restaurants abroad. Today, that number is close to 20,000. Now, to really drive home the point, Global Thai required a few key dishes to be featured and standardized. That way, no matter where someone might be, if they had a craving for something promoted through the program, they could find it. And what the people wanted was Tom Yum Goong. According to internet search data, Tom Yum, as of 2022, was the second most popular Thai food in the world, behind only Pad Thai. It's been nominated for UNESCO Heritage status, enjoyed by celebrities, and even lent its name to a 2005 martial arts movie. Diving into a bowl of this famous stuff became one of the very first missions for any first-time visitor to Thailand. And while local restaurants across the country were happy to accommodate the craze, one place at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University stood out above the rest. It's a place called J.O. Chula, and it serves the most famous Tom Yum soup on earth. It might be hard to imagine at a restaurant that's won every possible award and where wait averages as much as three hours. But before the honors and accolades, before this location, and before Tom Yum soup, Mwe Sai Chua, better known as J.O., almost quit the business altogether. She'd never intended to be a chef, but she married into a family that owned a shop selling duck congee, or rice porridge, and business was failing. In 1986, the shop went bankrupt, and the family was facing ruin. But with six children to support, J.O. took a risk. She borrowed 600,000 baht, at the time about 20,000 U.S. dollars, paid off the restaurant's debts, and renovated the building. She worked by herself every single day, and within a year had the loan repaid. Her risk would pay off into a thriving business. Now, the restaurant would and as her kids grew older and started helping out, after hours, it became their hangout spot to invite friends over and watch football on TV. Tired from long days of working in the restaurant, the kids would cook some instant noodles, and this became a tradition. Late nights and instant noodles at J.O. And especially, ramen in mom's Tom Yum with a little bit of everything that happened to be on hand in the kitchen. Fast forward to 2015, and J.O., still at the time serving duck with congee, expanded to a new location just down the street. With her children, now the third generation leading the business, they decided to take their late night snack and introduce it to the public. And the public fell in love. Until last year, the legendary J.O. Mama Noodles, honored by Michelin and coveted by everyone, were only sold from 11pm to 1am. That's it. By 8pm there would be a line, and by 8.30 the line would be so long it would be cut off. No more spots tonight. I've never eaten here. None of us have been here. Even with the new expanded hours, the line is just too long. But on this day, fate smiled on OTR. Prepared for a very late night of waiting in line, the biggest rainstorm of the year meant we'd only need to wait for like an hour and a half. Alright, so 99% of the time, if it starts pouring down rain the way that it did tonight, it wrecks our shoot and it makes us really unhappy. But this 1%, it kept the line at J.O. Chula manageable. So thankfully, because of the storm, we were able to get in here without waiting for 2 hours. It was only 1 hour today. And it's for this. It's for probably the world's most famous tom yum soup. I don't think that's an exaggeration. We got 2 kinds of what is called the Mama Noodles, which is the famous instant noodles, raw egg, crispy pork, squid, shrimp, crab meat, lime, all kinds of herbs and spices. And I am gonna give this a try. Yeah, alright. Daria is way ahead of me on this one. Anybody who has knowledge of photography or social media is gonna love this place because it is very photogenic, beautiful food. And let's see if the taste lives up to the line and the fame. I will say this, for a place that's this massively popular, people here have been friendly. They let Jasper. I don't even know what happened with Jasper. We lost him for like 45 minutes while we were waiting outside. I come back. I thought they hired him as a line cook. He's back there right in the middle of everybody else in the kitchen. This is not staged for the camera, by the way. We've honestly never been here before. We tried to come here twice, saw the line. It's good, but what it's really riding on for me is the muprab because that's something they're quite known for and it looks good. It's really good muprab. They say you haven't had tom yum until you've had it at J.O. Chula. And I have no idea if that's a statement I agree with, but I will say, after an entire day of slurping down every possible version, after tracking down the oldest stuff and trying some made for fighting COVID, after tasting the dish with pork knuckle, shrimp, hempato pancreas, and even without soup at all, we have definitively had tom yum. And while I still have mixed emotions about the overseas version of tom yum goong serving as a Thai cuisine, in pretty much any form, not only is there nothing more authentic, but I guess it says something that the same combination of flavors used here thousands of years ago is still at the base of whatever you want to call tom yum. And somehow, it's outlasted almost every other dish on earth. 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