Bangkok is one of those cities that hits you from every angle. Skyscrapers with rooftop bars (yes, the ones made famous by The Hangover Part II) tower over centuries-old temples, and the food scene ranges from 20-course tasting menus to a bowl of noodles eaten standing up or sitting on a plastic stool. It's an international hub with an internationally recognized food scene to match, and if, like me, you are only spending a few days in Bangkok before moving on, here’s where you should eat.

Potong

Potong might be the best tasting menu I've had in a while. I'll admit I usually find tasting menus a little pretentious and hard to connect with, but Potong is different: every course is genuinely flavorful, and the food is clearly personal rather than just impressive for its own sake.

The restaurant is tucked down a back alley in Chinatown, inside a 120-year-old Sino-Portuguese shophouse that belonged to chef Pam Soontornyanakij's family for four generations. They used the building to produce traditional Chinese herbal medicine, and "Potong" is actually named after her great-great-grandparents' herbal medicine shop. That history shows up throughout the meal as well. The Thai-Chinese tasting menu is built around Pam's family story and the building's past as a medicine dispensary, which gives the whole evening a sense of place you don't usually get from fine dining.

My favorite course was their take on pad thai: a single prawn served with a noodle dyed the colors of the Thai flag, somehow tasting exactly like pad thai in one bite. Be sure to come hungry, as the final duck course is absolutely amazing. Reservations book up well in advance, so plan ahead, and make time to grab a drink at their rooftop bar before or after dinner.

Jai Fai

Jai Fai is the only street food stall in the world with a Michelin star, and chef Jay Fai (Supinya Junsuta) became a household name after appearing in Netflix's Street Food series (the Thailand episode, from the creators of Chef's Table). She's a self-taught cook who started out as a seamstress, and it's genuinely special to watch her work, goggles on, wok in hand, clearly still in love with what she does after all these years.

The food is really good; get the drunken noodles and the crab meat omelet. It's become a bit commercialized, and the line is notoriously long (we saw people paying line-sitters to hold their spot). It's a fun, worthwhile experience once, but with so much excellent street food elsewhere in the city, you don’t need to wait hours in line if you only have a few days in town.

Thipsamai

Thipsamai is known as the birthplace of pad thai, and its history is tied up with the history of the dish itself. Pad thai became Thailand's national dish during World War II, when the country faced a rice shortage from the war and flooding. Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkhram pushed noodles as a patriotic alternative to rice, part of a broader nationalist push to create dishes Thailand could call its own. (Historians note this origin story is more legend than confirmed fact, but it's the one everyone tells.)

Thipsamai's own story starts with Samai, who learned to cook alongside her mother selling food from a boat on the Phasi Charoen Canal. She opened the restaurant under the Thipsamai name in 1966, and it's credited as the first to make "Pad Thai Sen Chan" using the specific chantaburi rice noodles, shrimp oil, and prawns wrapped in egg that have become the standard for the dish. Decades later, it's still considered the definitive version, and it's absolutely worth the visit to try pad thai at the source.

Chinatown Street Food Tour

If you want to sample the widest range of food in one night, book a street food tour through Chinatown. We did ours with A Chef Tour and tried more than 15 different dishes, including dumplings, satay, curry, chive pancakes, and mango sticky rice. It's a great way to eat your way through Yaowarat Road without having to guess which stalls are worth the stop, and it's a nice contrast to a place like Potong: same neighborhood, completely different way of experiencing Thai-Chinese food.

Between the fine dining, the street food legends, and everything in between, Bangkok's food scene lives up to the hype. If you only have time for one sit-down meal, make it Potong, but leave room to wander Chinatown and eat your way through the stalls too.