A Fully Flavored Food Tour of Bangkok

A Fully Flavored Food Tour of Bangkok

Since we launched our social enterprise in 2017, our main business efforts have centered around giving our visitors great cooking classes. When we’re speaking to schools or promoting our efforts in the US, we point to the smiley photos of guests with smoking hot plates of pad thai, as a symbol of our efforts. But making your Thai favorites in our cooking class is NOT the only way travelers to Bangkok are supporting the Courageous Kitchen. In fact, more and more people are beginning to discover our tours and community work because of our obsession with Thailand’s street food. 

Experience from years in Bangkok hunting great street food and restaurants was channeled into our tour Street Food 101 in late 2017. We’ve pushed the goal of the tour beyond overstuffing you with tasty Thai treats (which is definitely a major part of the plan), to introducing you how to navigate the amazing and intimidating hawker fare available in the main streets and back alleys all over the city. This doen’t just begin when the tour starts, but guests can even download our street food pocket guide to begin studying in advance for our crash course in street food mastery.

Still we didn’t expect the tour to become popular. But with nearly zero promotion, people hunting a unique street food experience began finding us. This always comes as a surprise because the tour description is written in a way as to turn away many of people reading. With only a few seats available on the tour each week, we want to make sure we’re attracting adventurous eaters who’ll make the most of the chance to feast on authentic, and often terrifically spicy street food fare. For a tour of Bangkok’s Chinatown or for a more general survey of popular street food, we’re happy to point people to another company instead. 

The controversy surrounding Thailand’s street food bans, and Michelin stars being dished out to such low key eateries in Bangkok, must have also helped propel travelers’ curiosity because we have been busy. What else could explain our local newspaper mention below, sent by a family from South Africa?

We’re still incredulous!

“You’ll end up having a better understanding of why Bangkok is considered one of the top street food cities in the world…” 

Through word of mouth or social media, so many of you found us online, that midway through 2018, the cooking class and street food tours were starting to provide a significant amount of fundraising for the families we help. This has meant more budget for kids cooking classes, and being able to distribute rice and other staples to families in need. 

 For now atleast, our cooking classes are still our most popular activity. But don’t be surprised if you began to hear more about our street food exploits. We know that impacting our local community by serving people in need, and encouraging our guests to become better travelers, is what truly makes this unique experience a fully flavored food tour, and we hope to share it with more of you in 2019. 

PS – Special thanks to Karin and family for finding, scanning, and sharing this article with us!

Author: Dwight

Dwight is the director of Courageous Kitchen, and loves sharing his passion for food with new people. 

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3 Ways to Support Courageous Kitchen This Holiday!

3 Ways to Support Courageous Kitchen This Holiday!

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courageous Aprons

Our supporters can finally sport the Courageous Kitchen logo in their own kitchen!

3 ways to give back!

01

Pre-Order Aprons

Be the first to get your hands on a Courageous Kitchen apron!

02

Download Recipes

Download 5 of our most popular recipes and help us fund our first cookbook. 

03

Take A Cooking Class

Book an authentic cooking class for you and your friends!

our top food experiences

Thai Cooking Class in Bangkok

Try Sri Lankan Cooking in Trincomalee

Thai Cooking Demo and Dinner in San Diego

Bangkok Street Food Tour

Courageous recipes 2019

Download 5 of our most popular recipes, including pad thai and mango and sticky rice! When you make a donation with your download, it will help us fund a larger cookbook of 20+ Thai recipes!

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5 star Reviews

“This was a really fun experience for our whole family. Also wonderful to know our tourism dollars we’re helping local people. Highly recommended."

Elijah

Guest, October 2018

"Amazing cooking class. Lily, Nisha and Dwight were wonderful. I enjoyed the class immensely, and what a great organization!"

Liting

Guest, November 2019

"If you are in Bangkok you MUST visit Courageous Kitchen! Dwight and everyone gave us a top notch cooking experience. The food is SO good and you feel like you’re at home with family and friends while you’re there. I will return every chance that I get."

James

Guest, October 2018

Micro-Giving This Holiday with Amazon Smile

Don’t forget if you’re shopping with Amazon, this holiday you can select Courageous Kitchen as your charity of choice with Amazon Smile.

As your designated charity Amazon donates a small fraction of the proceeds of each sale back to our charity!

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Two Big Safety Improvements Coming to Courageous Kitchen

We appreciate you checking in with us this month and we’ve got two big announcements to share from Bangkok. The first is that there’s a piece of equipment we’ve needed for quite some time and it’s finally arrived. We’ll give you a hint, it’s not a giant oven, or some expensive “must-have” kitchen gadget.
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From Your Hood to Ours

If you’ve been following our story, a few months back we renovated a run down house to be a kitchen space with the help of funding from Bangkok Patana School. The new space allowed for use to have more room to host the swarming children of the neighborhood, who all seem interested in cooking at once. However, even after painting, replacing the floor, and knocking out a wall, the new space still wasn’t much of a kitchen.

That’s because doing more cooking in large groups was nearly impossible to do safely with the little to no airflow in the building. In Thailand, most kitchens are powered by portable gas burners which can be dangerous to use with out safety precautions, including having good ventilation. This also meant when we made traditional chili filled Thai dishes, we didn’t have to do much before everyone in the room was coughing and choking on the spiced filled air which couldn’t escape the room.

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The good news is we have just installed a custom made exhaust hood into the room. We should have done this a few months ago, but honestly there had been several delays in making the hood happen. We appealed to private donors and to foundations offering grants, but none of the parties were interested in the not so flashy upgrade to our kitchen. Instead we used funding from your efforts to fund cooking classes this year, and spent about $500 to install a new ventilation hood. The new hood will not only improve the safety of our students, but because it is large enough to accommodate more than one burner, it will also open up greater possibilities for our cooking curriculum in the future.

Securing our Bridge to You

The other big safety upgrade is a bit technical, as we’ve just installed an SSL certificate to encrypt our website. To put it in laymen’s terms, we’ve improved the security of our site to be sure your information is safe. This means whether you’re making a donation, booking a cooking class in Bangkok, or just purchasing a t-shirt, all your information is transmitted safely and securely.

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The added encryption to our website also opens up more possibilities in the future as we grow. For example, the added security may expedite further development of online teaching resources, and fundraising products for our own mini-marketplace. And more importantly, it means you can give not only with Paypal, but with any credit card you want, without fretting about being exposed to fraud.

We’re steadily building towards ambitious goals to connect better with you and improve the lives of our students and their families here in Thailand. Thank you for joining us on this journey and stick with us as we grow, and strive to conquer our most ambitious and challenging year yet!