The Making of Haroon Food Market

Learn from the past, carry on the present, taking Haroon food to the future

Starting from the food tour to the E – sarn northeastern part of Thailand to sourcing local ingredients and discovering tasty local salt which is much undervalued for one kilogram sold at just less than 1 baht. This inspired Bo – Salila Chartrakulchai, former event, and party organizer/planner. She started to question why the local Thai ingredients are so undervalued. So she decided to do something to make changes and founded NOSH NOSH Project in 2018 which means ‘yum yum’ with the intention to create an Educative Dining Experience, a space to learn through eating to turn the urbanite’s attention to the local food source and value the people within the local ingredient production cycle more.

Hidden Gems, Halal Legendary Food

The latest NOSH NOSH collaboration with Haroon Mosque Community in Soi Charoenkrung 36 is the Halal food market, a special edition for Bangkok Design Week 2023. The market has over 30 stalls selling their signature dishes for you to try. Most of all the dishes are old recipes, passed down in their family through generations for hundreds of years. Haroon Mosque Community is one of the oldest Muslim communities in Charoenkrung district, which has held several food markets in the past to increase the community economy, and liveliness, and invites ‘Nice’ friends to get to know the district’s food culture.

Bo’s first mission is to explore and get to know the people in the community. She discovered that their descendent are mostly from South India which has many dishes with unique charms. But these recipes are slowly disappearing without anyone carrying on the recipes. “Each one of their family recipes is very interesting and rare to find. Some of the recipes I’ve never tried before, and some I ate here for the first time like the desserts Bayia Bean Cake, Suji Ka Halwa, and Fish curry which you can’t even find on the menu of the Indian restaurants. Some menus have their own cooking tricks like using two frying pans, one with high heat and the other with lower heat. Frying the hot one then onto the other to get pretty colors.” The first thing to do is to start figuring out how to continue the legacy of these recipes.

Add the Food Market Charms with Designs

Apart from that, there are art elements that Bo thinks should be added for better communication. “Before this, the stalls had separately done their own designs, they didn’t have the proper designers. So, I thought to bring in (designers) to help oversee the overall art direction, logos, and other media like promotional videos and heritage recipes cookbook ‘The Haroon Cook Book’ to get people who haven’t been to Haroon Market interested, and know how the food is cooked, their histories, to intrigue them to come to the market next time.”

For the design to be more complete, Bo invited two designers to join the project. First, Maan – Jirawat Sriluansroi, the owner of The Only Market Bangkok, who has spent his time learning Thai lettering calligraphy technique during covid period and compile his work on Instagram Thaipologic. Bo has been a fan of Maan so, she invited him to design the ‘Haroon’ lettering to use as a logo for the community’s food market.

“I feel that anything that is personally handcrafted with our own signature is endless. Say I want to write the word ‘love’, I can write it a hundred times and it won’t be the same, but each is still our own signature, which is different from the set typeface. By the way, it depends on the audience preference, but as someone who constantly creates new things, I want to create something of my own, so the handcrafted lettering is more unique,” the famous designer explained about his handwritten lettering.

From Family Recipes to The Haroon Cook Book

Another important person to this project is Ton – Asazak Azvahiransiri, a freelance architect who helped oversee ‘The Haroon Cook Book’ design and props to liven up the location. “When I explored the Haroon community market, what impressed me most is the fact that the food sold is the same as what they cook at home, they put in so many ingredients and sell them at a very low price. And it’s even more impressive when I get to know more about the community and see the steps it takes to make the dishes.”

Bo also added that the intricacy is the charm of Haroon foods, some dishes have to be prepped from 3 a.m. and the person who makes them is called ช่างแกง (curry specialist) When they make Biryani or Curry, they would make it in a large pot putting in at least 200 pieces of chicken. It needs muscles to stir, so the stirrer is mostly male. Each step of the prep is also very intricate and clean, with a strict cleaning process because one of the golden rules in Halal food prep is cleanliness. The strict cleaning steps, and a particular part of the meat to cut requires expert knowledge so the person in charge is called ช่างแกง (curry specialist) for their expertise.