Hoi Tod: How War, Money, and Chinese Mythology Created a Thai Street Food Classic

I've lost count of how many oysters I've eaten today, but I can promise you, it is the most I have ever eaten in a single day before. In 2017, the World Street Food Congress declared Hoi Tod, Thailand's mussel or traditionally oyster omelette, to be one of the three best foods in the entire world. Now I don't know what the Street Food Congress is or how I can run for office, but I do know there's a lot of people here who would agree. This is the dish that Michelin-starred chefs eat when they go out for street food. What Thai food experts go for instead of Pad Thai, and something that's one of the quintessential experiences of eating in Bangkok. So today, we're on the hunt for the city's best Hoi Tod. Picking our sides in a generation's old rivalry, and tracing history all the way back to the beginning. It's 10 o'clock in the morning at a place called Deng Racha Hoi Tod, which might be the oldest Hoi Tod vendor in Bangkok. I mean, it might be the oldest restaurant on this side of the river, period. Nobody actually knows, but by now the best guess is that the great-grandfather of Uncle Deng served his first oyster omelette sometime before 1920, and as long ago as the 1890s. And just like his predecessors, Uncle Deng has been at work since long before the sunrise. He took today's delivery of fresh seafood around 3.30 in the morning, straight from the water off the coast of Chonburi. Then it's five and a half hours of checking, shucking, cleaning, and preparing every single shellfish, finishing just in time for a 9am opening, where he'll sell omelettes until he sells out. Which at any of Bangkok's legendary oyster omelette locations, never takes very long. We're starting here for a couple reasons. Number one, they also have a coffee counter. And number two, this sells out fast. And the fun thing about today is that I have never been to any of these locations before, because every time we come here, you're just enjoying your noodles off in the corner. Every time I've come here in the past, they've already been sold out. So this is going to be my first time ever tasting these. Like all traditional oyster omelettes, Uncle Deng prepares his specialties on a heavy, round, cast iron pan, sitting over coals heated to just the right temperature. If you see this pan in Bangkok, it usually means one of two things. Hoi Tod, or Pad Thai. And that's not a coincidence. According to some, it was Bangkok's Hoi Tod vendors who first started making what would become Thailand's national dish. Anyway, the classic Hoi Tod is made by cooking oysters or mussels in oil, with a thin batter made from a combination of rice flour and tapioca starch, then with an egg cracked on top and mixed in, making something light and fluffy, crispy and chewy all at the same time. For a simple dish, it's surprisingly technical, as is the other version made here, one that's soft and runny and just barely cooked, so light that the texture comes from the oysters themselves. I don't usually order this kind. It just doesn't fit my foreign sensibilities where I like things crispy and deep fried. But when we had this at the floating market in that previous video, it was very sour. It was the sour starch that they used, I guess. It wasn't the quality of the oysters. Those were fine. But this is not sour at all. This is just, it tastes like oysters. That's all it tastes like. So much better than I expected this to be. Now the truth is, if I'm gonna be completely honest, this is a tough dish to describe. It's subtle, like really subtle, and again, it's pretty much just three basic components. Flour, egg, and oysters. But that's not the point of this adventure. Because even though Hoi Tod is so simple, the technique in making it inspires perhaps more passion, more arguments than anything else in Bangkok. Across Chinatown, there are a handful of shops that specialize in this dish, and everyone here, at least in the city's Chinese community, has a favorite. Where you go for your fix defines your personality, your generation, your family, with allegiance often passed down like the bivalve equivalent of Celtic versus Ranger, Coke versus Pepsi, Katz's versus the Carnegie Deli. It's hard for me to explain to someone who's not in Bangkok, hell even someone who is here but isn't in Chinatown, just how intense and heated this is. Especially when it comes to the place we just left, and the one where we're going, 700 meters away. For generations, Deng Racha was the undisputed king, the first Hoi Tod to bring the dish to the masses in a place honored by the Shel Chuan Chim, the Thai equivalent of the Michelin Guide. It's a classic, something made just so since the days of Rama V. But then another family opened their own stall, called Nai Mong, and starting in the 1980s, they'd get all the publicity. TV appearances, and magazine articles, and even, in 2018, a coveted spot in the Michelin Guide itself. The differences between the two omelets are small and technical, but big enough to create a rift in Chinatown. Dividing families and neighbors, although in fairness, at least in public, the stalls themselves have no obvious animosity. I mean, they're too busy making Hoi Tod. Okay, so this is Nai Mong Hoi Tod, which is also a place that we have never been to before, but we attempted to come to once. And yeah, I have no excuse, we just haven't been here. This has a very different atmosphere from the first place that we went. Here, it's a factory, and there was no small talk, no conversation. Hey, can we film in here? Sit down, what do you want to order? Okay, but you look at the lines waiting outside, you know, and I guess right now, you know, it's 11.20, so we came here kind of the off hours. But nine o'clock this morning, big line. Noon is going to be a big line. Right now, every table's full. Got two things. We got the crispy Hoi Tod, which here, it's really interesting because it's very different. It's just a crispy omelette with the oysters on top. And then in this case, we got the soft Hoi Tod, which is what looks like a crispier version. It's not as soft as the soft one at our last filming location, but let's try it. So I'm going to try the soft one first. Let's try this. Tastes like a carnival funnel cake. It's just this crispy bomb of oil. Let's try it with the oysters sitting on top and the gravy. Alright, with four omelettes down and at least a half dozen left to go, I'm already out of words of description. Hoi Tod is what it is. It's good. It's fine. And we can talk about the minor differences in the selection of oysters or the percentages of rice flour versus tapioca starch in the batter, but who wants to watch that video? By the way, in case you're waiting for me to choose a side in this old rivalry, I'm Team Dang Ra Cha. But Jasper preferred Nai Mong, and Daria, well, she doesn't actually eat oysters so it's technically a 1-1 tie. But that doesn't really matter because finding out who makes the best Hoi Tod is not the reason we came to Chinatown. See, this is actually a dish that has one of the most insane and unexpected backstories we've ever encountered. A dish that helps explain a huge part of modern Thai cuisine, the history of everything from local economics to the Thai royal family. And even why to some, oysters are considered a vegetable. Alright, let's get into the story, starting at the very beginning. This is Guan Yin, the goddess of compassion for Chinese Buddhism. And according to tradition, once when she was young, she found herself lost at sea with no food for survival. So she prayed and asked that if she dipped her oar into the ocean, she might pull out something safe to eat. Of course, she pulled out an oyster. Now that story isn't canon. There are other versions that say it was actually a Buddhist monk in that boat. Or the mother of a monk. Sometimes it wasn't an oar, it was a si zhang, or prayer stick. And sometimes it wasn't one oyster, it was a hundred. There's one story where it was in the desert, not the water, and it was the monk Xuanzang on his way to bring the Buddha's teachings to China. And when he ran out of food, an earthquake split the ground and revealed a bounty of oysters. There are more, lots more, but the ending is always the same. Oysters became sacred and were rewarded with enlightenment. Their souls ascended to a higher plane, and their earthly bodies were no longer important. Which is why, to J Buddhists who follow a strict vegan diet, oysters are exempt. They're vegetables. And oyster sauce is officially a vegetarian condiment. Now, it's worth pointing out that it's 2024, and by now most vegans, including J Buddhists, do not eat oysters. But the point is, they could. And in the old days, that's one of the reasons they were so important to Chinese cuisine. Especially in the coastal south. Which brings us to the topic of today's video. There are two stories about the creation of the oyster omelette, and they're both incredible. So before we go back to eating, let's run through those next. The first takes place in 1661 on the island of Taiwan, then occupied by the Imperial Dutch. Now, this is actually a pretty wild story, because it involves a general named Koxinga, a real person, by the way, who was a Ming Dynasty officer, and who for 17 years had been fighting a war against the Qing, who had overthrown the Ming. So Koxinga is fighting and fighting and getting pushed further and further towards the coast, and finally he puts his army on boats and brings them to Taiwan. He rallies support, defeats the Dutch, and then declares himself Emperor of the House of Koxinga, which would rule Taiwan for the next 22 years. Anyway, the story says that when Koxinga attacked the Dutch, they responded by trying to starve his army. They hid their rice and took all of the edible supplies into their fortresses. Koxinga was left starving on a beach where he noticed some oysters, which he recognized as a sign, after all, that's basically Buddhist mythology. So he collected as many as he could, coated them in sweet potato starch, and deep fried them with... I don't know, just go with it. The army was saved, the Dutch were defeated, and a brand new dish was born, which would quickly spread across the water. The second version of the story sounds less apocryphal, but it's still pretty wild. This time, the protagonist is a man from Fujian province named Chen Zhenlong, who just like Koxinga, really did exist. Anyways, the 1590s and Chen has failed out of college and is struggling in business, so he started a new endeavor, sailing on a trading boat bound for Manila. In the Philippines, Mr. Chen discovered a plant recently introduced by the Spanish called the sweet potato, and he wanted to bring it back to China. But the Spanish had imposed a strict ban punishable by death for exporting sweet potatoes. But Chen was determined, so he stole a sweet potato vine, covered it in mud so it looked like a rope just pulled out of the ocean, and by 1593, it was growing in his hometown. Now it turns out that his timing couldn't have been better. Just one year later, southern China suffered a severe drought. This also actually happened, by the way, and sweet potatoes proved themselves able to withstand harsh conditions. They sustained the locals during the famine, and to stretch the supply further, a lot of it got milled into flour. And it was just a few miles away from Chen's hometown, along the Fujian coast, where that flour became a staple when there was no other food. In fact, it was said that during the worst months, entire towns survived on sweet potato flour, eggs, and the oysters that grew in abundance right offshore. Either way, whichever origin story is to be believed, the end result is the same. By the middle of the 17th century, oyster omelets were famous, iconic, and perhaps the most important dish in parts of coastal China. And the middle of the 17th century is just a few decades before the story shifts south to Thailand. And that's also pretty fascinating, but we'll get there a little bit later, because for now, it's time to eat some more vegetables. And get back to our mission. So this is like, if you look online for what locals in Bangkok, where they go for the best huay tod, there's a lot of people who believe in this place, which is actually part of a chain. I was reading the story, it's up on the wall. The first one opened in Phuket in 1994, and it's famous for its gigantic cast iron pan, which weighs 400 kilos apparently. That's a thousand pounds that that thing weighs. It's half a ton, that's insane. But yeah, speaking of half a ton, I feel like I weighed half a ton after as many oysters as we've eaten today. One of the upshots of the rivalry and competition between Bangkok's old huay tod legends is that it brought a wave of new interest to this ancient dish. The list of shops selling huay tod has exploded in the last decade, and no one has seen their own star rise as much as Heng Huay Tod Chao Lay, which seems to be opening a new shop every other day, as the city can't get enough of this fantastically crispy omelette, strategically sold wherever there are trendsetting young people, like at this place near the famous Chulalongkorn University. Here they've put a modern twist on the old classic, selling their huay tod not just with oysters or mussels, but also with stuff like scallops, sea bass, shrimp, and crab meat. Although to give a fair comparison, we have to go for the old school version, made with their own farm-raised oysters from Thailand's central coast. This is the first time I've been here, I've never tried this before. Oh yeah, that's actually really good. That's a lot of oysters today. It's pretty wild to see a dish that's probably 400 years old still perceived as modern and trendy, and sold marketed to young people. In fact, it's even more impressive when you think about the last place, Nai Mong, having been viewed the same way when they opened 40 years ago and took Bangkok by storm. And while there weren't a lot of food bloggers or instagrammers at the end of the 1800s, we can assume that huay tod was just as exciting to what was then the young generation, all the way back when Deng Racha opened its stores for the first time. Actually, we don't have to assume anything. We know that for a fact. Alright, let me go back to the story. So we left off in southern China around the middle of the 1600s, with oyster omelettes becoming popular thanks to a famine of lack of food. Now famines at the time were quite common in that region, thanks in large part to the widespread dependence on rice, which meant that natural conditions, a drought or a flood, could be catastrophic. This was made worse by a Qing dynasty ban on imported rice, intended to boost local agriculture but with the unintended consequence of regular periods of starvation. So in 1727, the government finally ended the prohibition, and the biggest beneficiary other than the Chinese people was Siam, and especially the rice-growing region along the Chao Phraya River. Now I don't know why the Siamese rice trade came to be dominated by migrants from one specific city on China's southern coast, the city of Chaozhou. Maybe it started with one successful merchant, and then the word spread and thousands more flocked to Ayutthaya, but whatever it was, within a decade, the Teochew, a word used for speakers of the language of the Chaozhou region, well they would become so successful that they became a part of Siamese aristocracy, the upper class. Bangkok was through much of the 1700s a Teochew settlement, a village of Chinese rice barons who would fill boats to sail north to Ayutthaya, or the other direction, into the South China Sea. One of the most successful immigrant Teochew traders would have a daughter who would be known as one of the wealthiest and most influential people in old Siam, and her son in 1782 would claim the throne and take the name Rama I. He'd choose for his palace the site of the old rice trading village, and the people who lived there would move a few hundred meters to the east, establishing a site called Sampang, which today is better known as a part of Chinatown. For the next century as Bangkok grew and developed, the city was largely fragmented into ethnic clusters, with the Teochew, Siamese, Hainanese, Malay Muslims, and more separated into their own neighborhoods, divided primarily because Bangkok was hard to get around. I mean, it was a city of canals, and to move from one place to another you had to do it on the water. But in the late 1800s, Rama V, the great-great-great-great-grandson of the famous rice baron, started the process of constructing roads and permanent structures on land. And once Yawarat Road was built at the center of Chinatown in 1891, the Teochew, the old rice barons, would quickly build another empire, establishing the city's first restaurants, the first public sit-down eateries, and the first places where anyone could buy a quick and cheap bite to eat, which would become massively important in a city that would soon be moving at a rapid speed. Teochew dishes quickly caught on across the entire spectrum of Bangkok's diverse culture, in large part because they were available and soon sold everywhere. Things like khao tom, or a thin rice porridge with seafood, kway teow, or noodle soup with things like pork broth and fish cakes, not to mention noodles themselves, in particular the flat rice noodles that would evolve into things like pad see ew, boat noodles, and pad thai. There's kway jub, an iconic Teochew dish served almost identically in Bangkok, hoi jo, crab and water chestnut wrapped in tofu skin, and khanom gwee chai, or chive pancakes, along with, of course, hoi tod. Now hoi tod, as we already mentioned, is not from Chao Choe, it's probably from Fujian, and that's the reason why in places with a huge Hokkien or Fujianese diaspora, like Malaysia and Singapore, oyster omelets are traditionally made with sweet potato flour in the original style, and in Thailand it's done with tapioca starch and rice flour like in Chao Choe, which is close enough to Fujian to share plenty of dishes, but far enough away to make use of different ingredients. The oyster omelets served in Thailand are derivations of how the dish was made in Chao Choe in the years when the rice traders first settled Bangkok, and while not all of the old Teochew dishes would find a wider audience, this one did. In fact, it caught on in a way that immediately made an impression on local cuisine. And we know that because business for hoi tod vendors must have been so good way back when the roads were built, that more than one of those first sellers are still in business today. What were you just doing? That's not what I mean. This is a street in Chinatown called Plang Nam, which literally means name change, a title given by King Rama VII to indicate a fresh start for the alley, which for a very long time had been known for four things. Vice, garbage from the wet market next door, an old execution grounds a few steps away, and cheap Teochew food, which thankfully is the only one of those things that survived. It's this street and the alley adjacent to the south that formed the old eastern boundary of Sampang, the original Chinatown, the western boundary of the busiest section of Yawarat, the road built in 1891, and it's here that at the very least feels like the epicenter of Teochew Thai cuisine. This is the best Chinese sausage in Bangkok. This is like a must stop if you're ever in Chinatown. This is unrelated to the video, but I'm going to pick up some. Here on this alley, you'll find dishes like bird's nest soup, a favorite of the Thai princess as long ago as the year 1800, or less than two decades after the founding of Bangkok. There are street snacks like siu mai said to be the best in the entire city, and this was even where the very first coffee shop started doing business, though it moved during Rama VII's cleanup to a spot about 200 meters away. But we're not here for sausage or coffee or even the famous siu mai. We're here because it's the path leading to what I consider to be one of the most fascinating restaurants I've ever been to, one of the most unique places in the entire country, and the most hidden and biggest gem among all of Bangkok's hidden gems. I'm talking about a restaurant called Yim Yim, and oh my goodness am I excited to finally have a reason to bring you here. Alright, I fully understand my own excitement might be over the top, but not only do I study food history, but I was also in a past life. I lived in China for 12 years, I know Chinese food more than any other category, and this is fascinating. It's a time capsule of an era that even in China is long, long gone. The oldest teochew restaurant in Bangkok, the oldest sit-down restaurant in Chinatown, and as far as I'm aware, the only place on earth, including in Chaozhou, that still serves a full menu of local recipes unchanged since the 19th century. Untouched by the influence of consumer tastes or new ingredients, just the food eaten by the immigrants who settled Sampang and Yawarat. Today's Thai-Chinese dishes as they existed when they were first introduced to wider Bangkok. Including, of course, the oyster omelette. This one we call Or Suan, which is oyster omelette with flour. We use the tapioca flour, yeah. And because the Chaozhou part is near to the, next to the sea, so we have a lot of the seafood stuff, and this one is one of our famous dish. Over 121 years, Thai cuisine has changed a lot. Yes, Thai cuisine. Tastes have changed, people's flavors change. You know, young people want different things, right? Why do you keep traditional? Very few places serve such traditional food. For me, as a Chinese chef, I love this restaurant. I love this restaurant, but it's also not trendy. It's not modern. It's very classic. Why do you keep it like that? It starts from my grandparents. Because my great-grandparents tell them to keep what is the Chaozhou style, the traditional style. And since I take over the restaurant, before I take over the restaurant, it's my great, my grandparents order to me, like, you have to keep it the same thing. Otherwise, I won't let you do. If I'm going to be honest, this is my favorite version from today by a lot. Just personally, maybe it's triggering all these memories, but like, let's be honest, it's also by far the most expensive version from today. Can I help you? The oyster omelette served here is less about the crispiness, less about the textural contrasts than the version known as hoi tod. Here, it's pretty much as I remember from Chaozhou, an omelette with oysters, seasoned only with fish sauce, no sweet Thai chili or sriracha. If I had to characterize the difference between dishes found both in Thailand and China, and this is a massive oversimplification, but it's that tasting two things side by side will typically lean sweeter in the Thai version, and saltier in the original Chinese dish. And that is most certainly the case with hoi tod, as well as the other two things we ordered here at YimYim. There's salted olive fried rice sold in Chinese Thai restaurants across Bangkok, but in the Chaozhou style, it's not fried at all. It's baked in a clay pot, and served here with three garnishes. Dried red chili peppers, diced fresh lime, and cashews. And then there's this. Flat noodles with fermented radish and kale. There is very little way that we can overstate the significance of immigrants from Chaozhou and Shantou into what became Thai cuisine. We cannot overstate that. And so I just wanted to show a couple of dishes. These flat noodles. How much is this now a, you know, classic part of ahan tom sum, of stir-fried Thai cuisine? Like, you cannot imagine Thai food without the use of flat noodles like this. You know, pad see ew, rad na, like he was telling us. But if you go to the source, to where I came here from, this is a dish that, to me, Dory, after 12 years in China, half that time in the South, that tastes like home. When you try it with the fermented, did you try the noodles yet? Dude, Jasper, you've never been to China before, but this is as close as you're going to get in Bangkok. The fun thing about doing a video on Hoi Tod is that, unlike a lot of other stuff we cover, here it's possible not just to go to the library, learn some history, and find old recipes, but to just take a walk around and actually taste it. To actually try something that's pretty much exactly what somebody might have eaten to survive if they lived along China's southern coast during the famines of the Qing dynasty. To trace this dish as it's spread overseas, and try the versions cooked in the days when Bangkok's Chinatown was a bustling immigrant trading post right next to the brand new palace. To try it reimagined by a younger generation, one raised not as immigrants but as Thai-Chinese. And then, to try it as it's most popular now. A hip and modern version of this. It's living history, and something that tells at least a part of the journey of the modern city of Bangkok. But there's one big part missing. So far, this story that we've told has focused on the Chinese diaspora. How this dish travelled from Fujian to Chaozhou, Chaozhou to Bangkok, and then gained a following in the city's Chinatown. We know that by the 1910s, when ice and refrigeration made seafood more common inland, the oyster omelette had already been introduced to Thai people, and began to gain popularity. So what happened to the dish when it separated from the Chinese cooks who knew its old traditions? What happened when Hua Qian became Hoi Tod, and turned into something all its own? Something with its own characteristics. A dish now sold all across this country. Well, in the next couple of days, it's going to be a science experiment to see what happens after my day of eating oysters by the bucketful. But my oyster consumption is done, and we are onto mussels for our last stop. Because realistically, if you're in Thailand, there's a 99% chance that the first Hoi Tod you encounter is going to look a lot more like this than it's going to look like the stuff that we've shown you so far, because this is everywhere. This is Hoi Tod as it's best known. And while it might not have the deep connection to history, it might not have a spot in the Michelin Guide, and in this case, it doesn't even contain oysters, it is amazing. It's a simple dish elevated to something where the whole is so much greater than the sum of the parts. Like the way it's served here, for 50 baht or $1.44 at Yod Pad Thai, my own personal go-to Hoi Tod. It's an egg pancake with tapioca flour. It's spongy, it's eggy, white pepper, sweet Thai chili, a little bit of sriracha, mung bean sprouts on the bottom. And that is, you know, that's it, right? Like it just comes down to how's your technique and how fresh is your seafood. And in this case, technique is perfect and the seafood is fresh. This is not meant to be revolutionary. It's meant to be comforting, it's meant to be fast, and it's meant to be... I actually don't even know where I'm going with that. I've had a lot of oysters today. The next 24 hours is going to be a wild card. I don't think I've ever been in a position where I've had 100 oysters in my system all at once. I don't know what I was thinking, eating oysters all day. Like, oh yeah, that'll be fine. Like I was thinking about this as a video, not as me having to actually eat, like not even exaggerating, 10 dozen oysters today. Everyone thinks that they're doing you a favor. You know, you go to a restaurant and they just scoop these. Hey, we use extra oysters. Look at all these oysters they give you. They treat this like it's luxury, like it's a good thing. Like we're going to see this and be like, oh wow, look how many oysters he gave us. But like when you're filming a video like this and you have to eat it all day, like no, no, no, I'd appreciate it if you gave me less, right? Like you're not making me happy with... Don't tell me you got extra oysters. That's the last thing I need. Subscribe to the channel for more from OTR. Thank you so much to our Patreon supporters. You make this channel possible. Find links below to our Patreon and social media, and Happy New Year.