Photo by Jarrett Wrisley
To try the fried chicken that induced Jarrett Wrisley's week-long search, click here.
It wasn't the weather that first pulled me back to Bangkok, or the anything-goes atmosphere, or the milk chocolate, mystic river. It wasn't green curries or red light districts. It was simpler than that: I returned for ridiculous fried chicken.

Photo by Jarrett Wrisley
Eight years ago, I was a hapless backpacker fresh off a flight from China. I checked into a hotel on lower Sukhamvit Road, nearby Nana plaza--an ignominious address. On my first stroll out of the hotel, three-wheeled tuk-tuks roared past, choking smoke, along with buses and taxis and shrill little motorbikes. The concrete overhang of Bangkok's skytrain, which runs overhead, brought all the commotion closer. Imagine Broadway if it cut through a concrete parking garage; everything was immediate.
On the uneven sidewalks, sandwiched between tee-shirt vendors and streetwalkers and creepy sex tourists, there was food. Food of every shape and scent: sweet coconut cakes gently browning and bubbling, and seafood hotpots atop charcoal braziers; bananas coated in candy and sesame that danced in brown oil, and shreds of sour papaya salads tossed through a spicy bath in great wooden bowls. Clack-clap-clack went the mortars, transforming garlic, papaya, and chilies with fishy alchemy. But it was all too much for my senses, so I ducked down an alley.