Shakshuka is eggs cooked in tomato. That is the whole idea. Everything else is argument.
People ask about it more than anything else on our menu, usually because they have seen a photograph of a pan of it somewhere and want to know what they are looking at. So here is the answer, from a kitchen on Khao San Road that has been making it for a very long time.
What is actually in it
Tomatoes, onion, red and green peppers, garlic, oil, and a lot of patience while it cooks down. Then eggs cracked straight into the sauce and left until the whites set and the yolks are still soft. It comes to the table in the pan it was cooked in, with bread.
That is it. No cream, no cheese, nothing hiding. If the tomato is good and the sauce has had enough time, it does not need help.
Where it comes from
North Africa, mostly. Tunisia and Libya are where the arguments usually start. It came to Israel with people who moved there in the middle of the last century, and it turned into a national breakfast somewhere along the way. Our Israeli customers grew up eating it. That is how it ended up on a menu in Bangkok.
Why we serve it at any hour
Because that is how people actually eat it. Shakshuka is filed under breakfast, which is fair enough, but a pan of eggs in tomato sauce is a good dinner and a very good late lunch. We are open from 10:30 to 23:00 and it goes out at every one of those hours.
It is also the thing to order when you have been on a night bus. Hot, soft, salty, mopped up with bread. You feel human afterwards.
How to eat it
With your hands. Tear the pita, push it into the sauce, get some yolk on it. Do not be tidy about it. Half the point is that there is sauce left in the pan at the end and you have bread to deal with it.
Order Israeli salad on the side if you want something sharp against the sweetness of the tomato. It is 140 baht, cucumber and tomato and onion cut small, with lemon.
Vegetarian, and genuinely so
Shakshuka is vegetarian by default, not by adaptation. Nobody takes anything out for you. That is worth saying on this road, where a lot of the meat free options quietly are not.
Come and eat it
Shakshuka is 210 baht. We are at 86 Chakrabongse Road, Talat Yot, Phra Nakhon, a few minutes from Khao San, open every day 10:30 to 23:00. Delivery runs until 20:00 on 02-282-9948, though a pan of eggs is better where it was cooked.