SOUTH
In the southern city of Trang, breakfast is the most important meal of the day, with queues forming from the early hours for dim sum, crispy pork and sweet fritters. Words: Hannah Summers. Photographs: Ulf Svane
Huge fans stutter on once-white walls. A lady wearing red lipstick and a silk dress settles into a plastic chair and points at tiny saucers on the marble table in front of her. There are two or three pork dim sum on each; she jabs one with a small fork, swipes it through a sauce that matches her outfit and pops it into her mouth. It’s 6.30am.
In the southern Thai town of Trang, breakfast has been underway for several hours. And here at Sin Jiew, one of the city’s most popular dim sum joints, school children, newborns, dogs and office workers gather before dispersing to continue their day. It’s still dark outside, where roadside stalls smoke with tiny pancakes and large chunks of dough bob in pots of scalding-hot oil.
Trang is a pilgrimage site for food obsessives — mostly from Bangkok but occasionally also international travellers detouring from the region’s pretty, under-visited beaches. The day starts early — 4am early. And breakfast reigns supreme. I meet Winnie, a friend of a friend of a friend, who’s excited I’m here, and, naturally, wants to meet over a meal. “In other parts of Thailand, funeral celebrations last three days,” Winnie says, signalling for more dim sum. “But here they last 10 days, so there’s more time for food. It’s the Trang culture. And people aren’t going there to pay respect,” she laughs. “They are just going to eat!”
Like thousands of others, Winnie’s been dining at Sin Jiew since she was a young child, having dim sum for breakfast before school every day, often returning for dinner. It’s normal here, she explains, to start the day eating in restaurants instead of at home — a tradition established by rubber workers in the countryside nearby. Tapping rubber trees is best done between midnight and 4am, when the maximum amount of liquid can be drawn. Afterwards, the workers need to refuel, so the town’s been shaped by these working hours. “They eat at 7pm, 10pm, midnight, 4am, 6am, 9am, 12pm,” Kuang, the owner of Sin Jiew, tells me. “Now it’s normal for Trang people to eat nine times a day.”
They aren’t short on choice. Passing pastelcoloured townhouses and roads crisscrossed with electricity cables, I reach Jeeb Khao, another of the 70 or so dim sum restaurants in town, where policemen, and pensioners in kaftans and Crocs settle in for their first, second or third breakfast of the day. The fourth-generation owner, 32-year-old Mae, was born in a room upstairs, and runs the restaurant with the same enthusiasm as her great-great-grandparents did 90 years ago. “We think breakfast is such a big deal,” she says, pouring boiling water over a cup stuffed with chrysanthemum flowers, di
