We Tried 4 Michelin Restaurants in Bangkok for $30

When you think of Michelin food, you probably think expensive. But Bangkok has a different relationship with the Michelin Guide because here, some of the city's best food isn't found in expensive restaurants, but on the streets. Today we are trying four Michelin Guide spots, eating four completely different dishes across four different areas in Bangkok, all for under 1,000 baht. Most of them we loved, some of them not so much. So let's see what Michelin food in Bangkok actually gets you. The first restaurant that we're going to is actually in Silom District, which is Bangkok's business district, known for five-star hotels and expensive restaurants. But up this little alleyway, we are going to find the most delicious braised pork. This is the restaurant here and straight away we are seeing the Michelin sign from 2019 all the way up to 2026. Let's go inside and eat. So our first stop is a place called Chao Ren Sang, which is known for its braised pork and is recognised by the Michelin Guide. Now as you can see, it's pretty simple. It's pretty unfussy and the food and the cooking are obviously the main attraction here. Now we are here because a Michelin recognised meal for 60 baht is probably the best way to test the idea that Michelin food has to be expensive. Now this pork is braised in a dark and aromatic sauce until it becomes very tender. You'll see the meat here is slowly breaking away in this bowl. I'm just going to give this a try on its own, just the meat. Do you know what? Instantly what that reminds me of is like a honey roast ham you would have on a Sunday that is such a similar flavour. That broth that this has been braised in is rich but it's slightly sweet. And then we're going to just mix in a bit of this coriander to see if this will give it a nice bit of freshness. Do you know what? That is 10 out of 10. Before this came over, I was slightly worried that the meat was going to be really fatty, full of collagen, all that kind of jelly meat, which is quite popular with pork like the way it's served. But I don't particularly like meat like that. But look at this. You just cannot get enough of that. Alan obviously mentioned that the meat is pretty tender, not fatty, but the lady did ask if we would like a bit of the fat. So it must probably not be very popular for tourists. We're not really used to eating fatty meat as much as the locals here. I think the most interesting thing about this dish is it is not traditional Thai flavours as Alan said. It's pretty sweet and it's almost like a pulled pork burger, barbecue sauce. It's sweet, it's tangy and then you've got the lovely coriander to kind of make the sweetness of the flavour. Really good. Stop number two. We are in Song Wat. Song Wat is one of Bangkok's oldest commercial districts situated right next to the historical Chinatown. As you can see around me, this is completely different to the big modern Silom that we've just left behind. These are all old classic shop houses that have been turned into little cool, funky, quirky cafes and art shops. But we are not here to see any of that. We are here to get some famous braised goose. So this is the restaurant here, Urari Braised Goose. And as you can see, it is very traditional and placed just here on the side of the road. Now this place might seem old and outdated, especially now that all of the cafes and restaurants around are becoming very trendy, Instagrammable. A lot of young people are coming here to hang out with their friends. But this place has stayed the same. It has not changed a thing in decades. You'll see here we've literally just got the metal tables, little stools at the side of the road and the old aunties serving the food. It's probably a family-run institution. Medium, eh? Some mussel out? Some mussel out. Dish number two has arrived. Take a look at this massive plate of braised goose. It's served with rice, a dark sauce and what looks like two chilli and garlic sauces to dip in. But this is, the goose has just been cooked really, really slowly in this rich liquid. And as you can see, the meat has gone really, really tender and the skin has really taken on all that flavour. The skin's just completely changed colour here. The meat is just so, so soft. You can tell they braise that so slowly. I think they open very, very early in the morning here. So they've obviously got the meat cooking way before sunrise. Just look at that and look how much the meat's changed colour, just taking on so much of that flavour. That's tremendous. That's the best thing that we've had so far. Now, interestingly, this dish isn't actually served hot. These obviously were cooked a couple of hours ago and they've cooled down, but they've given us this extra load of really rich brown sauce, which is hot. Well, when you dip it in the sauce, I'm guessing that's what it's actually braised in. And when you dunk it right in there, you just get so much more of the flavour. It's so rich. It's very salty, but very good. Wow. I am so excited to try this. Wow. The meat is cooked to perfection. And interestingly, the skin on the outside of the goose isn't fatty at all. It just sort of melts into the meat. I think what's so interesting about eating this dish on the side of the road in Bangkok is this is actually a dish that we had in Shandong in China, a Cantonese dish. And obviously we are very near Bangkok's Chinatown right now. This has got the Chinese influence in the flavours, the cooking methods. Such a contrast to traditional Thai cooking. You've usually got rice, meat, lots of chilli, lots of garlic, all served in the one plate. But here, the star of the show is just the meat. You've got the rice on the side and you've got your two different sauces to go along with it to kind of change the flavours up as you eat. And obviously this is a massive plate of meat here. We've got different parts of the goose. There's also congealed blood on the plate here. I don't know if we're going to be brave enough to try that. We'll see how it goes. But yeah, this has got a load of different parts of the meat on it, which all have different flavours as well. So it's a great plate of food. Right, let's see how much this sauce can change up the flavour here. It kind of looks like garlic. I'm not really sure. Maybe some spring onion. You get that a lot in Chinese cooking. Let's get a bit of the meat and we'll try and soak it up with all this flavour. Here, that's a very sour sauce. Maybe lemon or lime. Lots of garlic. Oh my god. That is definitely like orange zest and garlic in that. That is so sour and so overpowering. I think I prefer it with the dark sauce for sure. Through the menu there, and this is the size of it. There are these things on the menu and three of them are the goose. So you've got small goose, medium, large, soup and rice. So you know that this restaurant has absolutely perfected the food that they're serving out here. And that is why they've earned their spot here for decades. And now they have finally managed to get themselves a Michelin star for two years running. And one thing to note, if you are planning to come here, the small goose plate was sold out when we came and it says here that it usually sells out at 10.45. So we had to go for the medium sized one, which was 420 baht, which is over what we were trying to spend today. If you travel a lot, then this might be for you because this is something I have been taking everywhere with me. This is Meridian's 3-in-1 portable espresso machine. And what I love about it is just how flexible it is. You can use your own ground coffee, you can use Dolce Gusto pods, or like me, you can carry your favourite Nespresso pods. Because this thing is self-heating, you do not need to find a kettle or a coffee machine. So you add the water, add your own coffee, and this thing heats and brews directly inside the machine. With 20 bar pressure, it makes espresso with a smooth, rich crema. It also charges with USB-C, making it easy to keep powered when you are travelling. Whether you are staying in a hotel, an Airbnb, or you are working away, your coffee setup literally comes with you. Your morning does not have to change just because your location does. Check out the Meridian 3-in-1 portable espresso and use code ALLANSHANN20 to get 20% off your portable espresso machine. If you are actually following this tour step by step, then make sure you do come down these little side streets in Songwha. There is just literally no end to such cool little neighbourhoods in Bangkok. And I urge you, if you are a tourist here and watching this video, follow this route exactly. Because look, this will just have you wandering through little streets which you would never have found otherwise. Following on from what Allan said, if you are here in Bangkok, make sure you do explore these side alleys. That is where a lot of these unique and wonderful restaurants, cafes, independent shops are. If you stick to the main road, you get caught in all these tourist traps. When you are out and about, make sure you go down these wee tiny alleys that look like there is nothing there because I bet you will be surprised. We have arrived in the old town of Bangkok and as you can see around me, this looks a little bit different to what we started in with the ultra modern business district in Silom than the old classic Chinese neighbourhood at Songwha. This is the old town. This is where the government is, the military is. And things look a little bit different here. It's not very busy and there's not very many tourists on these streets. But this part of Bangkok is a little bit different. You don't need to rush through here. This place is nice. You're just going to slow down a bit, enjoy it, take a nice walk along these gorgeous canals. The pace is a little bit different in this neighbourhood. Have a look at this. We are sort of in the middle of nowhere. There's absolutely no tourists here. There's no workers here. This is just on a random street and this is a restaurant that you could almost walk by. We are heading somewhere called Ten Suns to try their famous Michelin Bib Gourmand recommended beef noodle soup. Let's go inside. So here we go. This is what we are going for. Ten Suns, the legendary beef soup of Bangkok, Michelin Bib Gourmand. And as you can see outside the restaurant, this is very well decorated. 2020, 2021, 2022. And then inside we've got all the more modern ones. 2023, 2024, 2025. And this year, 2026. Going at the Michelin guide again. So with the menu, on one side we've got all the cuts of beef that we've got. So we have braised beef, the Kobe beef, which is from Kobe in Japan. With cheek, tongue and shoulder. Now I don't know if you get to choose with whatever dish you choose. We've got noodles or rice. So not sure how it's going to work. What are you going to go for? I am going to go for the beef cheek if we get a choice. That looks like a nice lean cut. Can we have braised beef cheek with Hong Kong noodle please? With soup. Thank you. Two please. We have went for braised beef cheek soup with Hong Kong noodles. Wow, that was a mouthful and a half. And this one costs 160 baht each. Okay, I have to say this is probably the most exciting meal that we've had yet today. This is the braised cheek Hong Kong noodle soup. Quite a mouthful. But check the size of this dish. We have loads of bits of meat on this. We've got the lovely soup, some nice seasoning over the top, some spring onion, coriander, garlic and then those lovely noodles. And the size of the chunks of meat. As soon as he was cutting that open, you saw how pink it was in the centre. It has been cooked to perfection. But let's dig in. Wow, look how easily that meat has just fallen off. So we've got a bit of the meat along with the soup. Cheers. Wow, that meat is just breaking away in my mouth. And this soup has such a unique flavour. This is probably the first thing we've had today that has those sort of Thai flavours. It's like the blood soup that you get in Thailand, although I think the rich flavour of it is just coming from all that meat that's been boiling and braising probably for hours and hours. And once they're using the different cuts of meat, there's also different flavours in the soup. So that just comes together so lovely. Wow, this is the most exciting bowl of food we've sat in front of all morning. And the thing that's different about this is the broth is so clear and almost translucent. So I'm guessing it's going to be really, really light. Oh my days. That is insane. It looks exactly how it tastes. It's got that dark, dark colour. It's rich, it's aromatic, salty, a little bit of sweet. That is absolutely insane. Although I'm going to grab my chopsticks and try a big chunk of this meat. Look at some of the size of the chunks of meat they've given us. It's so generous. You see how easily that just broke apart in my teeth there. I must admit, sometimes we eat lots and lots of Thai food. It's lots of chicken, it's lots of pork. You don't really get beef so much. It's not commonly eaten in Thailand. That's so much a shame because that is genuinely unreal. You can tell it's been slow cooked for just hours. Wow, I think I can confidently say that that is my favourite dish we've had yet today. But if you look at the other two restaurants that we've been to, they were packed, they were busy, they were noisy, they had a bit of an atmosphere and we were even fighting to get a table. It's quite crazy that this place is recognised to have very good food but it doesn't have the people. And that was actually only about a 20 minute drive from where the roast goose was so it was pretty close by. Interesting. So that one cost 160 baht for that bowl of beef noodle soup which comes out at £3.60. What an absolute bargain. That was packed with meat, packed with flavour. On to the next one. Before we head on to our fourth and final destination for some food, we are going to show you one of Bangkok's best travel hacks. Now if you are coming here blindfolded, you're going to spend a lot of time sitting in traffic but you don't need to because there's a secret way of skipping the traffic in Bangkok and it's by travelling on these canals right here. It's cheaper, it's faster and it's a better experience. In the city centre, that has to be the best way to travel through Bangkok. We came all the way from the old town to Chitlom which is like city centre and it costs only 40 pence. It's a much more enjoyable way to travel through Bangkok. You get to see all the little houses along the canal, how all the local people live and it's so much better than hopping on and off the BTS. It's a nice change of scenery and we're back in the city. We are back in central Bangkok for the fourth and final stop of our Michelin Guide food tour around Bangkok and apart from Ploeng Chit where we are standing right now being about a million degrees, it's also very different to the other two regions. This is right in the heart of central Bangkok. There's skyscrapers, there's offices, there's lots of workers which means lots of tasty food and we are heading to somewhere called Neom Thai Cafe. I may have absolutely butchered the name of that but we are going to try some orange and yellow sea bass curry. For the first time today we are trying some seafood. Much like everywhere else where we have eaten today, we are not eating on the main road. We are down one of these back streets with thousands and thousands of restaurants all around us and guess what, we can't find where we are trying to eat. Here we go, look at this, gorgeous from the outside and the same as every other food stop. We got there, medals of honour, 2019 all the way to 2026 and there's a few other awards that have been handed out here. Can we order the yellow orange curry with pickled bamboo shoots and andaman sea bass please? Just one please. Have you ever tried this before? I have never tried before. This one is very spicy and it's very strong. Okay, how spicy? Less spicy. Yes please, less spicy. Okay, thank you for letting me know. Gentleman who's serving us might just have saved us there. He's told us that the yellow and orange curry is very, very, very spicy and very, very strong. I am not built for the spice anymore so we've got it nice and weak. I want to enjoy this but let's take a look around this restaurant. This is a little different to the first couple of places we ate in. They were much more local and they hadn't really changed much through the years but look at this one. It's a beautiful little modern restaurant and again all the awards up on the wall and there's also a couple of other ones. You've got the user's choice and I guess this is like the Chinese food place guide award. And another noticeable change about this restaurant is that they have a very vast menu. There's a lot of Thai dishes here but I like that the first page is just everything that they recommend so that's one of the dishes that we went for here but you can get things from as basic as spring rolls in this restaurant so they really do cover it all. Well this is substantially bigger than what I was expecting it to be and very terrifying for somebody wearing a white t-shirt so I'm going to do my absolute best not to get this all over me but this is absolutely packed. Let's have a look at what's in the bowl. See underneath, look at all that sea bass. So this is like yellow curry paste stir-fried with Thai spices and then turned into actually what is a much more watery sauce than what I was expecting. Fish looks extremely flaky. Oh wow. Well the gentleman warned me that this was very spicy so if this is it with a little bit of spice I would hate to find out what it's like without full spice. This right here is such a different type of curry to what you would typically expect when you think about Thai cuisine. You know you hear calling of Massaman curry, green curry, red curry, Penang curry, all such majorly popular dishes but the yellow curry sort of gets neglected and to be honest eating this right now I have no idea why. While I'm getting that orange, it's quite zesty orange in there which kind of balances the whole dish because it's got that spicy and peppery from the chillies which gives it all that heat and it's kind of just balanced with the zesty orangeness. Gives it a little bit of sweet Thai-ness. Do you know the more I actually eat this dish, the more I'm finding it very, very complex. There's so many different flavours going on at once. Those pickled bamboo shoots bring such a sourness to the dish because when you bite into them all that vinegar just squeezes right out. This is so different because when we were planning to eat a yellow curry here I was fully expecting this to be the substandard Chinese style yellow curry which we've all had many, many times before. My first thoughts on this dish is that I'm a little bit nervous about it. It smells very, very fishy and the more Alan's trying to describe it the more nervous I'm getting so I'm gonna just put a little bit of everything on my spoon here trying to get all the flavours together. So we'll get a little bit of the rice with the sauce, the fish and the pickled bamboo shoot. I mean to me it's not really a dish in flavours that I like. I think it is a wee bit too overwhelming. Too many flavours, too many contrasts. The only way I can describe this is there's just a lot going on with one mouthful of this. It looks like a normal plain curry dish but the flavours in it are just like off the charts. Well that is the first dish we've not completed. Two reasons behind that. This is the fourth dish we have ate in about a three hour period so we are stuffed and to actually find the flavour of this bar too overpowering but the gentleman who took our order did actually say to us that this is a very, very strong flavour so I guess that's actually down to my own eating power and eating habits that just don't quite sink in with this but that's cool. I guess this is much more of a local dish. It's just very, very, very sour. The more I eat it the more sour it tastes especially with all those bamboo shoots which have obviously been in vinegar. Personally for me it's my least favourite. Unfortunately for that it's the most expensive. Four meals complete and I know that we say we didn't really enjoy the last one but you know what we're not massive fish eaters. When we were planning the video we didn't really want to just have pork, chicken, lots of Chinese influenced food so we tried to push the boundaries and get some more interesting food because if you're booking a holiday to you don't want to just eat what we like. If you're coming to Bangkok follow this tour if you want to try some good food. There is insane food at every corner in this city and although we spent double the amount of money on the braised pork back in Songwha the total of today's food for both of us together was 990 baht so about 30 US dollars or about 25 British pounds. That is an absolute steal and I think the best thing about this tour is we didn't stick to the one area. We explored the old town, Chinatown, the city centre and the business district so we really got to explore the city, jump on different modes of transport and eat some delicious food along the way.