Why you should hang out in Bangkok’s shopping malls

I’m a man of the streets.  I like concrete under my feet.  This applies double when I’m traveling, as I like to be doing things out on the streets, especially eating.  One reason I like hanging out in Bangkok, Thailand is it’s one of the best cities in the world for street life.  There, I take most of my meals on the street, do much of my shopping there, and some of my drinking.

But if you have any extra time there in Bangkers after hitting the streets, seeing the temples and palaces, and getting a massage, consider spending some time in a few shopping malls.  That’s not a default tourist activity, no, but stay with me.  It’s not merely that the malls are fun, or air-conditioned.  There in the controlled environments, you’ll discover a lot about the culture of modern Asia.

All over East Asia, I find so many malls to be the utter opposite of what they are back home for me in the United States, in which malls are where culture goes to die.  Asian malls are fun, exciting, and innovative, and they seem to compress many good elements of their culture instead of gentrifying it to death.  They feel alive.  Their culture is laid out in the malls, along with tidbits from other cultures they find interesting.  They have neat coffee and dessert shops and inventive new restaurants.  They’re decorated with silly wonderful things.  They have the most up-to-the-minute fashion and trends, and their food rocks the house.

 

Looking down from the top of the Terminal 21 mall

Opening a mall is a competitive sport in the East Asian megacities.  Every few years there’s a new hip mall opening that suddenly makes it the coolest spot in the city, until next year when another one opens or is refurbished.

In Bangkok, we visitors are lucky because most malls are clustered towards the center, around Siam Square and along adjacent Sukhumvit Road, both serviced by one line of the BTS skytrain, the elevated mass transit that makes getting around much easier.  We’re lucky even further because the skytrain platform includes elevated walkways, meaning that in the Siam Square area, we can walk from place to place without having to descend to ground level and worry about crossing streets.

 

The bottom level of Terminal 21

My favorite Bangkok mall of the moment is Terminal 21, because it’s clever, designed well, and has great food.  It is a joy to wander because it’s stuffed with up-to-date everything and is just so frakking cool.  The mall has nine stories (malls get high in Asia), each named and modeled after a world location, such as London or Tokyo.  Signs mark your arrival and departures from each place, keeping with the theme of the mall as a terminal, and the floors reflect their theme.  The bottom floor (“Caribbean”) has a giant lighthouse, and the San Francisco floor a giant model of the Golden Gate Bridge.  On the London floor, the bathrooms are indicated by signs in London Underground style, the blue banner in the red circle, and you walked past a fake subway train to get there.  In fact, you should check out the bathrooms on every floor.

The stores in Terminal 21 tend to be numerous and small, tiny by Western mall standards, meaning you see so many many different styles and products, perfect for people with low attention spans.  The little stores, some not more than a corner, just keep coming, and so many have cool names such as “I’m Not a DJ” and “Bang!Bang!” and “I Don’t Have A Name” on level 2 or “Must be in your closet” on level 1.  Consider the names of these stores, each from level 3:

• Bunny Never Sad
• Oh La La
• Make N Happen
• Pink Pvssy
• I’m Lady
• It’s Skin
• Must Have
• Kiss Me Doll

This is why I love Asia, especially southeast Asia.  Nobody does cute like the Asians.

 

Level 4 contains dozens of restaurants, some chains like Pepper Lunch, Yoshinoya, and Red Mango, and the neat fish and chips place Café Fish.  Level 5 has more restaurants along with the happy chaos of the food court, and here is where we must realize that food courts in Asia can be amazing.  They are not full of chains like in the West; the big chains are outside.  Food court vendors are more like an outdoor market model, small places usually focusing on one thing.  They’re awfully cheap.  My favorite stand in Terminal 21 is Namprik Suntharee, featuring traditional Thai chili sauces.  Drop by just to look, even if you don’t eat.

 

Please eat this.  It will make you happy.

 

I found a blogger who has a ridiculously comprehensive guide to the Terminal 21 food court here.

 

My favorite restaurant in the Terminal 21 mall is on the second or third floor, just to the side of the escalators, and if anyone can find the name of the place I’d appreciate it, as I can’t locate it on any website or interactive map of the mall.  It’s cute and it’s very Thai, not a fast-food place, but not fancy in the slightest, and my cute waitress seemed just thrilled to serve me.  All the staff clearly were not comfortable with English and they were a bit afraid of me (and other foreigners), but that just added to the fun.

I was the only Westerner there until a Euro couple was placed next to me.  They order veggie fried rice and two Coke Zeros.  “No garlic,” the guy says to the waitress.  “No egg.  No onion.”  The waitress is flummoxed, and surely runs to the back to have a stress breakdown over the impossible task fate assigned to her.  Me, I ordered a spicy catfish salad and fish with Thai herbs, and the waitresses suggested a crab fried rice, all remarkably good.  The lemongrass beverage I ordered was the first clue that good things are coming—it was a flavorful green drink in a small carafe with three frozen sticks of the same beverage sticking out of the glass.  Oh, how stupid cute!  Oh, you must love a place that does this.  You must clap your hands.

 

Let’s move across town to a mall near Siam Square, to the Paragon mall, where the bottom floor is yet another brilliant food court and where you might find a sunburned me some afternoons, sucking down a large juice drink before I attack my fish ball curry.  What I love about Thailand mall food, especially the food courts, is they are not watering down or standardizing the food.  There’s no McDonald’s effect here, not yet.  Food court food is still mostly street food.

Next to the food court are dozens of small open restaurants, just taking up various square patches on the floor.  Next to them are the prepared food vendors, my favorite, which again is somewhat like being in a market.  Steamed stuffed buns, wonton and dumplings, grilled skewers, coconut tacos, all under glass in counters for you.

Behind them is a gourmet grocery store, worth a stroll, as you can buy a wide choice of beer by the bottle and prepared sushi.  There are a few small round counters there acting like mini-restaurants, where a single chef in the middle is making food, but they’re not cheap.  One is seafood-themed, where I found people drinking champagne and eating low dishes like fish and chips and high ones like hake with beurre blanc and fresh parsley.

 

Paragon is geared towards high-end shopping, not just clothes, as you can also visit their Aston Martin or Lotus showrooms if you’re in the mood for new wheels.  If this is too rich for you, let’s go across the street back into Thai culture.  The MBK mall (Mahboonkrong) is somewhat geared towards Thai teenagers and young adults.  I am neither, but it doesn’t stop me or you from checking out the huge place to see what’s going on.

What’s going on is crowds buying cell phone accoutrements, hair accessories, the latest movies and video games, handbags, leather goods, luggage, and shoes, along with all the streetwear.  People are shifting through manga books and figurines.  You’ll find this place much more affordable, and bit more like a market than a mall, with small stands about.  This is one mall where you should bargain for the price.

 

I can’t recommend the MBK food court.  The first time I went there, back in 1999, it was brilliant.  Their juice drinks were 25 cents and I would down four of them, and their food was fantastic.  Now, their food is one of the cheaper food courts around, and still very Thai, but the quality is iffy.  I was there in January 2016 ordering a squid tom yum, spicy salad, and the flavor was so off I left it almost untouched.  A visit two years before that was also disappointing.

 

I don’t know what’s going on down there on the street outside MBK mall, but I’ll snap it.

I mentioned earlier that you never have to go down to street level, but around Siam Square (the south side of Rama Road), you should.  There’s always something going on there.  I’ve seen fashion shows with girls dancing on top of cars, Muay Thai (boxing) exhibits, and a few other music things I failed to understand.  The annual Cosplay Festival and the Tattoo Festival are held there, and that says it all.  The street level there holds a night market that can be massively crowded, and also a good seafood eatery.  It has menus and table service and fish laid out for you to choose, all there on the sidewalk.

Nearby is Siam Center, a small mall but very modern and featuring more local Thai brands than most.  If you’re feeling too materialistic and secular by this point, the mall cluster has a surprising number of temples and shrines crammed between them.

 

 

Also nearby:  Central World.  Besides the massive department store Zen and the massive sports store called Super Sport (no imagination there), or the gourmet market up top, the reason to go here is one section full of the latest restaurants.  Called Groove, it’s stuffed with high-end concept restaurants.  Much of them are foreign, including a branch of Maxim’s and Fauchon from Paris, but a few are Thai, such as E.A.T. and Apinara.  I find this all to be too expensive for my own tastes, but being Bangkok, a good experience here (and these places are frakking gorgeous, designed all to hell) will still cost you much less than in many other cities.

Walking north on Ratchadamri road past Central World on your left, you’ll find more shopping centers lining the street, but the atmosphere turns more local and less slick.  Once you cross over a canal, turn left.  One attraction here is the Pantip Plaza, a mall dedicated to IT.  Geeks roam the many floors here searching for computers, computer parts, software, and all sorts of gadgets, including photography.  This is a fun, fun, place, a place where USB drives and discount MP3 players are in bins in the hallways, but the quality varies widely, so only buy something pricey if you know what you’re doing.  The software, of course, could be pirated, as well as the DVDs, some of them of a rather sordid nature.  The entire place needs a good dusting.  One strategy is to head to the largest store in the mall, called IT City.  Prices will be higher, but you can trust the merchandise.

This being Thailand, there’s some food in the mall, but this being computer geeks, the food isn’t worth it.  Go elsewhere for that.

 

This list barely scrapes the surface—there are more than a dozen other massive cool modern and telling malls about.  I often use them as breaks, from the heat and grittiness of the attractions outside.  Bangkok is an energy-draining city and you need some respites.  You also need to see both the old and the new when traveling, and too often the focus goes towards the old.  Any list of attractions there in Bangkers starts with the palace, then the big temple, then the old house, then the second palace, and such.  Yet megacities like this are alive and changing.  Now and then, a traveler needs to take time to see where the average, plugged-in resident is hanging out, and what they’re up to.

 

While you’re in Bangkers, go see the Metal Castle.  And check out my photo essay on the city, done in the course of one evening, of course titled One Night in Bangkok.

 

 

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