Thailand: Tom Yum Goong

Hot and sour Thai soup with shrimp

If there’s a single dish that captures Thailand’s essence, it might be tom yum goong. It’s spicy and sour, delicate but intense, at once comforting and like a roller coaster of competing scents and flavours. It’s the most popular soup in the country and is certainly among the more famous Thai dishes abroad. Most of the Thai people I know can’t go more than a few days without encountering — and savouring — it. The spiciness, saltiness, sourness and sweetness, all in their purest forms, all at once.

My first encounter with tom yum goong, or hot and sour soup with shrimp, came 12 years ago, on my earliest trip to Thailand. I remember the moment the first spoonful hit my lips — an experience I would describe as a flavour explosion. It was as if my senses all awoke at once. I’ve been addicted ever since.

Unfortunately, in my experience, the popularity of tom yum goong has led to a form of unhealthy competition. Many restaurants, vying to offer the tastiest version of the soup, have begun to make use of overly processed ingredients and to load the dish with too much sugar and MSG, a flavour enhancer and preservative.

Rongros, a tiny restaurant in Bangkok that sits across the Chao Phraya River from the stunning Wat Arun, or Temple of Dawn, has charted a different course. The name translates as House of Flavours, and there is no need for enhancers when the menu has been carefully crafted with recipes passed down from generation to generation. And if the ancient scents fail to transport you back in time, the traditional decor and beautiful old cracked walls — which evoke the oldest and most sacred parts of Bangkok — will.

The restaurant’s chef, Jirapa Pradabwan, carefully selects only the freshest ingredients: wild-caught prawns, lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves, galangal root, limes, red holy basil, Thai basil, tomatoes, straw mushrooms, Thai chillies and fish sauce. Using a clay pot, she then boils them in a bone broth made of fish, chicken and pork.

There are several restaurants with jaw-dropping vistas overlooking Wat Arun at sunset. Rongros, though, may serve the only dish — its delectable version of tom yum goong — that can live up to the majestic view.

Featured restaurant: Rongros, in Bangkok

Price: 350 baht, for tom yum with giant tiger prawns.