Would you dare sample a soup that has been simmering away for nearly half a century? Travel blogger Daniel Pinto did – and he shared his surprising verdict.
He visited Bangkok, Thailand, taking in the city’s famous Wattana Panich restaurant where a continuos cooking process has been underway since the 1970s. After recording footage of the family-owned eatery’s giant wok, Sam took to TikTok to explain: “This soup has been cooking for almost 50 years – Wattana Panich has been selling the same noodle soup since 1976.”
He continued: “Not just the same recipe, but the same soup. Basically, since starting they’ve never stopped cooking it. They just add ingredients as they go so it never runs out.”
Heading inside the restaurant, Sam revealed a wall listing its accolades, which impressively included Michelin recommendations awarded in 2018 and 2019. “Considering they’ve won so many awards, it’s actually a pretty low key spot.”
Indeed, very few diners could be seen sitting at Wattana Panich’s tables during Sam’s visit. “I was here an hour and didn’t see a single tourist,” he said as he prepared to tuck into a bowl of beef broth.
Sam added: “It’s locally known as Nua Toon and made from super fresh ingredients, delicious slow-cooked beef, many other parts of beef I’m not a huge fan of, and fish balls. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit nervous about how it would make me feel – but it did no damage.”
He went on to hail the broth’s “intense taste”, claiming you can tell it has been decades in the making. “For just $3 [£2.38] it’s my favourite place to eat in Bangkok, which is a city famous for it’s great food,” Sam gushed afterwards, whilst describing the soup as “absolutely delicious’ in his video’s caption.
With Wattana Panich’s location “quite far” from the city centre, he closed the clip by recommending combining a trip to the restaurant with a visit to Mark Wiens’ Phed Mark restaurant, which specialises in Pad Kaprao – dubbed by many as the national dish of Thailand. “Be careful though – it is hot,” Sam warned.
“The pot never gets washed?” one TikTok user responded in horror. A second cynic added: “No-one is talking about the two plastic bags sitting in the middle of the pot.” Whilst a third clearly wasn’t very keen to try it for themselves, adding: “My stomach is just bubbling looking at it.”
Reacting in support of the cooking method, however, one person explained: “It’s continually cooking, so is probably the safest soup known to mankind.” And a second added: “This is what families used to do years ago, back in like Victorian times they’d have never ending stew [known as perpetual stew], which was just kept bubbling and new ingredients added as it got eaten.”
