What to Eat at Bangkok Floating Market: Damnoen Saduak, Amphawa, Lat Mayom and Taling Chan

How eating works at the three kinds of market

Which market your calendar allows decides what to eat at a Bangkok floating market. The four of them hand food over in three different ways, and all four of them do their best eating early in their own trading day.

At Damnoen Saduak the kitchen is the boat. Vendors sell from sampans, cooks make boat noodles in a canoe, and the bowl comes up to you over the side while you sit in a hired paddle boat or on the concrete lip of the canal. There is no table, no tray and no sit-down meal, so order one thing at a time and keep a hand free.

Amphawa works the other way round. Seafood is grilled on wooden boats moored around the central bridge and charged by weight, with tables on the walkway behind them. The boats serve from midday until late evening; the small food carts come out at weekends only. The market's own site gives Friday to Sunday, 2 pm to 9 pm, closed Monday to Thursday, which rules out a Monday or a Thursday dinner there.

The two markets inside Bangkok are land kitchens with a canal behind them. Khlong Lat Mayom spreads seven zones and 404 stalls across both sides of Bang Ramat Road, the layout it has held since the 2007 expansion, with most of the cooking in Zone 6 and the sweets, drinks and fruit in Zone 1. Taling Chan keeps a floating platform in front of the district office where grilled seafood, som tam and noodles are cooked on boats tied alongside and eaten sitting on the ground, and live Thai music plays from 11:00 to 14:00 while you do it.

Best food at Damnoen Saduak floating market

The eating window here closes with the market. Most of the trading is done in the first two hours after 07:00, and by roughly 09:30 the main canal has turned into one long queue of tour boats; writers working on site put the real trading at about 07:00 to 12:00. The market day a pier operator posts stretches to 8:30 am to 2:00 pm, a figure to check on the day, but the pots come off the heat well before it: turn up at ten and your choice is food that has been standing on a canal too jammed for a cooking boat to reach you. Go early, or go to Amphawa instead.

Boat noodles are the dish to order, cooked in a canoe and handed across. Make it the first thing you buy, from a boat with pots on the heat rather than one warming food through. Food and souvenir prices here are fixed within a few baht, so there is nothing to negotiate.

Three markets share this canal. Ton Khem is the biggest of them and carries the most cooking boats; Hia Kui gives its frontage to souvenir shops stocked for tour groups, so there is less to eat along it; Khun Phitak, about 2 km south of Hia Kui, sees a fraction of the traffic. For eating, walk away from the souvenir frontage and towards the stretch where the pots are on the heat and the boats are still moving.

Coconut sugar is not a Ratchaburi product. Damnoen Saduak sits in Damnoen Saduak district, Ratchaburi province, roughly 100 km southwest of Bangkok; the sugar stoves are over in the canal villages of Samut Songkhram, one province on, around Amphawa and Tha Kha.

Amphawa floating market seafood, straight off the grill boats

Amphawa earns its reputation on the water in front of the central bridge. River prawns, shellfish and fish are grilled on wooden boats moored there and sold by weight, so you pick by size and the boat weighs your order before it goes on the charcoal. The grills work from midday until late in the evening, which leaves room for an early dinner, a late one, or both if you pace yourself.

Three things on that list belong to Samut Songkhram alone. Coconut sugar comes from the province's canal communities, where palm sap is tapped morning and evening and boiled down on a sugar stove. The mackerel carries the name of the Mae Klong, the river the market stands on. Yum Magda Talay turns up on the weekend carts.

Thai government guidance for Amphawa is to arrive before 10:00 and leave after lunch, which addresses the crowding rather than the food. Take the first half of it and ignore the second: get there in the late morning while there is still somewhere to park and a waterside table to claim, order from the boats once the charcoal is lit at midday, then stay on as the market fills through the afternoon. For a meal eaten outdoors at the water, the market's own site points to the dry months, November to March, when the air is cooler and less humid.

• Grilled river prawns from the boats by the bridge, the dish the market is known for
• Mae Klong mackerel, named for the river beside the market
• Hoi tod, the fried oyster omelette, cooked to order
• Pad thai made in a boat, and boat noodles, if you want something that is not shellfish
• Coconut ice cream, khanom sweets and desserts made with the local coconut sugar
• Ice cream sandwiches and Yum Magda Talay, a helmet crab egg salad: both need a Saturday or Sunday cart to be out

The land stalls at Khlong Lat Mayom and Taling Chan

Khlong Lat Mayom is where Bangkok eats on a Saturday. The draw is the spread of Thai food: grilled seafood, grilled chicken, papaya salad, larb, all eaten at low tables along the water, plus a grilled snakehead fish set built for a group to share. The cooking is concentrated in Zone 6, while Zone 1 holds Thai desserts, drinks and fruit; boat tours run from here too, and you can carry on by boat to the other Taling Chan markets.

Time the meal for the three hours from about 10am to 1pm, when the most stalls are cooking and before the tables start going as lunchtime gets closer. Arrive, claim a table, then split up and bring plates back from different stalls. Opening is Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, with 09:00 to 15:00 given by some sources; many stalls take cash only and the ATM is near the main entrance.

Taling Chan does the same job on a smaller footprint, and stages it better. The floating platform in front of the district office works as a dining deck: grilled seafood, som tam and noodles are cooked on boats moored against it and eaten sitting on the ground, which is worth knowing before you choose your trousers. Off the deck, the order list is beef noodles, a fried oyster omelette, Thai desserts sold by the box and herb juices by the bottle. It trades at weekends, about 08:30 to 16:00, with one listing giving 8am to 5pm, and the stalls thin out well before the posted close.

Khlong Lat Mayom opened on 20 November 2004, initiated by Chuan Chuchan, a local farmer and community leader who still owns it. The two markets are about 4 km apart, so one weekend morning covers both.

Portions, tables, spice and the hour to avoid

How much you order at once matters more than what you order. The canal format hands you single bowls and skewers over the side; the Amphawa boats sell by weight, so one order of prawns feeds a table; the fish set at Khlong Lat Mayom is a sharing dish by design. Two or three people eating in relays get through four times as many stalls as one person queueing alone.

Seating is the real constraint. At Amphawa the waterside tables around the bridge go first and the market only gets fuller after 16:00; at Khlong Lat Mayom the low tables fill towards lunch, so claim one before you start ordering; at Taling Chan the dining deck means sitting on the floor, which is worth knowing when you dress. On the Damnoen Saduak canal there is no table at all, one more argument for taking a paddle boat and having the food handed in to you over the side.

Say your chilli level before the som tam goes into the mortar, because nothing comes out of it afterwards. None of the four markets lists a vegetarian or jay stall, so do not build a day around finding one: the dependable meat-free eating is fruit, Thai desserts and drinks in Zone 1 at Lat Mayom, boxed sweets and herb juices at Taling Chan, and coconut ice cream, khanom and coconut-sugar desserts at Amphawa.

Buy from the boat or stall cooking in front of you, and favour the one with a moving queue. Eating at the end of a market's day is a mistake: Damnoen Saduak after about 09:30, Khlong Lat Mayom after 1pm, Taling Chan in its final hour. Carry water and small notes.

What to buy to take home at the evening market

Coconut sugar is the thing to carry out of Amphawa. The canal communities of Samut Songkhram tap palm sap morning and evening, boil it on a sugar stove until it thickens, then pack it in tins or set it in lumps; tins survive a suitcase better. On the same stalls sit dried fruit and snacks for the road, with handmade soaps, woven bags, herbal products and wooden crafts for anyone shopping beyond the pantry.

Tha Kha is where the pantry goods are, about 8.7 km and nine minutes by taxi from Amphawa: salted fish, shrimp paste and fish sauce brought up from the river mouth, alongside orchard coconuts, palm sugar, vegetables, shallots, garlic and chillies. Its trading calendar follows the moon. Market days fall on the 2nd, 7th and 12th of the waxing moon and the same three days of the waning moon, six mornings in each lunar month, with Saturdays and Sundays added; selling starts around 06:00 and is largely over by noon, the last stalls packing up between 2 and 3pm. Double-bag anything fermented before it goes near your clothes.

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