BANGKOK

Army United

Formed: circa 1964 (Renamed Army United in 2011)
Stadium: Army Stadium, Din Daeng, 02-271-2062.
Nickname: Green Army / Soldiers
Best Player: Tatree Singha
Website: www.rtafan.com
Main Sponsor: Acer
Army finished at the bottom in 2010, a full ten points from safety, but find themselves still in the TPL after sailing through the play-offs. There’s no reason to suspect they’ll do much better this season. Finishing in 15th place (one spot above the relegation zone) will be an achievement.

BEC Tero Sasana F.C.

Formed: 1992
Stadium: Thephasadin Stadium, Pathumwan, 02-262-3800.
Nickname: Fire Dragons
Best Player: Teerathep Winothai
Website: www.becterosasana.in.th
Main Sponsor: 3K Battery
Tero have signed a dozen players during the close-season as they try to assemble a squad capable of putting the club back among the big boys. The four-time champions have faded in recent years but should be able to improve on their ninth-place finish of 2010. Losing top scorer Anon Sangsanoi to Muang Thong is a big blow, though.

Thai Port F.C.

Formed: 1967 as Port Authority of Thailand F.C. (Renamed Thai Port in 2009)
Stadium: PAT Stadium, Khlong Toey, 02-671-9250.
Nickname: Port Lions / Khlong Toey Army
Best Player: Jirawat Makarom
Website: www.thaiportfc.com
Main Sponsor: FB Battery
There’s never a dull moment at Thai Port. The 2009 FA Cup and 2010 League Cup winners have been plagued by crowd trouble and distracted by a financial dispute between the club and the Port Authority. They finished fourth in 2010 largely thanks to Sarayoot Chaikamdee’s goals. But ‘Jo Five Yards’ has moved on to Bangkok Glass, and TP have lost several other key players. With their vociferous support, the orange and blues can beat anyone on their day—but they may have to settle for a lower league position in 2011.

Pathum Thani

Bangkok Glass

Formed: 2006 (bought out Krung Thai Bank F.C in 2009 to get a place in the TPL)
Stadium: Leo Stadium, Pathum Thani, 02-834-7000.
Nickname: The Glass Rabbits
Best Player: Kunihiko Takisawa
Website: www.bangkokglassfc.com
Main Sponsor: Leo
BG will look to improve on their fifth-place finish in 2010. They were the ante-post title favorites of many last year but they never came close to troubling Muang Thong. The close-season capture of Thai Port’s Sarayoot Chaikamdee will give them more potency up front and they should do better in 2011.

Insee Police United

Formed: 1960 as Royal Thai Police. (Renamed Insee Police United in 2010)
Stadium: Thammasat Stadium, Rangsit, Pathum Thani, 02-564-4425.
Nickname: The Policemen
Best Player: John Wilkinson
Website: www.pufc.co.th
Main Sponsor: Insee
The Policemen finished eleventh in 2010, seven points above the relegation zone. A host of close-season signings suggest that they are setting their sights higher in 2011. Hugely experienced and free-scoring midfielder John Wilkinson—a Singaporean international player with 30 caps—was a surprising yet inspired acquisition.

Nonthaburi

Muang Thong United

Formed: 1989
Stadium: Yamaha Stadium, Nonthaburi, 02-508-8100 ext. 8810.
Nickname: Twin Qilins
Best player: Kawin Thamsatchanan
Website: www.mtutd.tv
Main Sponsor: Yamaha
The 2009 and 2010 TPL champions are still the team to catch, but the Thai football world was rocked by the shock sacking of head coach Rene Desaeyere in early January. Clearly, it can’t be for what happened on the pitch and rumors suggest it was for behind-the-scenes disagreements over transfer policy. Whatever the reason, he’s gone, making retaining the title a stiffer challenge in 2011. The capture of the prolific Anon Sangsanoi is an important signing. If he can continue his scoring feats then MTU could be celebrating a third straight championship.

TOT-CAT F.C.

Formed: 1957 as Telephone Organisation of Thailand F.C (Renamed TOT-CAT in 2010)
Stadium: Chaeng Wattana Stadium, Lak Si, Bangkok / Yamaha Stadium, Nonthaburi), 02-580-6026.
Nickname: The Phoenixes
Best Player: Tomas Kozar
Website: www.tot-catfc.com
Main Sponsor: TOT-CAT
TOT is a club which seems to defy the laws of gravity in the TPL but can expect to seriously struggle this season. A messy legal wrangle between TOT Telecommunications and CAT Telecom—which saw TOT given full control over the football club—was only sorted out in late January. They’ve lost their president and some of their best players; they’ve signed no one and still don’t know where they’re going to be playing in 2011. Definite relegation candidates.
For analysis of the chances of all the TPL teams, don’t miss our new football blog at www.bkmagazine.com.

When he’s not busy playing politics, the (in)famous Newin Chidchob has also been attracting a lot of attention in the football world as the mastermind behind not one but two Buriram-based football clubs.
Newin moved TPL club PEA FC from Ayutthaya to Buriram after the end of the 2009 season. He also took over Regional League club Buriram F.C at the same time. He threw up a brand new stadium in double-quick time and managed to produce 20,000 fans almost out of thin air. The reality was that many of these fans had been attracted by free tickets, free merchandise, food vouchers and big enough cash incentives to encourage them to travel to away games. This artificial way of creating fan loyalty, and the atmosphere of manufactured enthusiasm whipped up at the i-Mobile Stadium where they play, isn’t to everyone’s taste, but it was certainly effective. PEA finished second in their first season in their new incarnation. Inevitably, there have been dark whispers about Newin’s involvement in the beautiful game and how he may use his power, wealth and influence to his teams’ advantage. There will undoubtedly be a conflict of interest, though, should Buriram F.C make it into the TPL, and all the signs are that this will happen sooner rather than later. What’s also sure is he will continue to make as many headlines as his teams in 2011.

TrueVisions signed a three-year deal with Siam Sport Syndicate which will see TrueVisions broadcasting 204 TPL matches per season up to and including the 2013 season. Good news for us and good news for each of the 18 TPL teams who receive four million baht per year from the deal. On top of this, NBT 11 will be broadcasting 68 matches in 2011 and T-Sport will be showing 34. All this means that for the first time every single TPL match will be televised live. Hello couch, bye bye life.

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“After the intensity of Black Swan, it’s sort of jarring to see Portman in something as vapid and and inconsequential as this. Kutcher? It’s not quite so jarring.” Stephen Silver, The Trend

“Portman will get past this speed bump with well-earned swiftness. The affable Kutcher, however, seems stuck in a cycle of depressingly empty comedies.” Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News

“Sadly, an obsession with raunchy one-liners trips everything up, turning a clever conceit into something closer to a sleazy, cheesy affair.” Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times

“Remember the Seinfeld episode in which Jerry and Elaine try to become friends with benefits, and set up unsustainable ground rules for their new arrangement? Imagine it rewritten by the Romantic Comeditron 2000 as a profanity-laced schmaltzfest, and you’ve got this tone-deaf dud.” Nick Schager, Time Out New York

 How did you go about selecting places for this book?
We took every recommendation that people gave us and tried it–we must have gone through at least 150 places. Some of them were disappointing, but most were really excellent, and it was hard to whittle it down to 50. Some of them were no-brainers, but some others required going two or three more times to figure out if we really liked them or not. All the members of my family have tried every one of these stalls at least once.

What were some of the challenges of researching and writing this book?
There were some days we had to eat at five or six stalls in succession, especially toward the end when we were on deadline. That was really hard. I think I still bear the stretchmarks as testament to that experience.

Any interesting encounters or street vendor stories?
They all had interesting stories. One vendor was actually really, really wealthy, and had sent all his children to study abroad in England on the money he made from roasting chestnuts. Another said he invented pad pak boong fai dang (stir-fried morning glory with chilies). Still another was a police officer supplementing his salary by running a fatty pork leg on rice stall.

You grew up abroad. Was it an adjustment to approach street food?
Absolutely! I grew up in a small Italian-American town next to Pittsburgh. We were big on wedding soup, calzone and cavatelli. So when I first came here, I used to never eat street food, ever, unless forced to by a friend or family member. It was too hot to sit out there, and it was intimidating–the ordering, the knowing what was good, the worries about hygiene. It was very late into my time here (I’ve been here on and off since 1995) when I started trying it, and I was blown away by how good it was. It’s still very hot at times though.

You also have a blog. Tell us about it.
Bangkok Glutton started out as a collaboration with my best friend, Karen Blumberg, who lives in New York and is really into photography and eating. It was also a good way to keep track of places we had tried out for the book. Most of the time it’s really fun – I can write anything I please, and sound like an idiot, and get things through that a proper editor would never, ever allow. But sometimes it’s work. I try to post at least once a week, but sometimes I’ve got all sorts of crap to do, and I have no idea what to write on Friday. This will be one of those weeks.

You used to be a financial journalist. Why the switch over to food?
Have you ever read that stuff? I used to report on the bond market. That should explain it all, right there. Telling yourself that it’s really a story about bettering people’s lives by expanding their capital-raising options only gets you so far.

How did you go about becoming a food expert?
Because I’ve always been into food. After I got married, we took a year off for our “honeymoon,” moved to Paris and enrolled in a French cooking school, L’Ecole Gregoire-Ferrandi, which is affiliated with the French government. In order to pass, there was a written part and then there was a cooking part that remains, to this day, the hardest thing I’ve ever done, including giving birth. I barely passed, but one of the chefs, who was kind of a jerk, kept shaking his head and saying “La honte, la honte,” [“the shame, the shame”] over and over again. That is when I figured out that I maybe wasn’t meant to cook, but instead should devote my life to eating. Which is what I’ve done. I practice every day.

Are you also an avid home cook?
I cook a lot. I get grumpy if I go a long stretch without cooking. It’s just a way for me to work things out in my head, like running on the treadmill. Cooking and reading/writing about food are almost exactly the same thing, which is why I like to read cookbooks before I go to bed. I don’t cook Thai food though. I cook what I was taught, French stuff or, if I’m feeling adventurous, Italian or Moroccan. I really should expand my repertoire.

Read the full interview at tiny.cc/vfqtz

Bangkok’s Top 50 Street Food Stalls will be available later this month at Asia Books and B2S for B390.