Simon Montlake - Correspondent

It was an invitation I couldn't pass up: A barbecued seafood dinner at the house of my driver in the southern Thai city of Narathiwat.

Madaree's four children were hushed at first when I arrived, looking somewhat disheveled after a long day of reporting on  the escalating violence in southern Thailand.

Most Thais are Buddhist, but Madaree and his family are Muslim, as are the majority of people in Thailand's three southernmost provinces bordering Malaysia.

Simmering ethnic tensions here have led to violence and harsh crackdowns by Thai security forces in recent months. Armed ethnic-Malay Muslim separatists, who draw on a pool of angry disaffected men, are increasingly terrorizing southern Buddhists – monks, teachers, farmers – causing some to flee or relocate to safer areas. (See recent story for more).

The Thai government has recently introduced sweeping emergency powers to combat separatist rebels fighting in Thailand's "Deep South." The emergency decree grants Prime Minister Thaksin Shinwatra the power to detain suspects without trial, monitor phone calls, ban public gatherings, and expel foreigners from trouble spots.

Fed up with the daily violence in the Muslim-dominated South, many Thais seem ready to see the authorities taking a tougher line.

Back in Madaree's house, the promise of grilled crab was a welcome respite from the day's reporting on the ethnic violence and a chance to savor the distinctive Malay cuisine.

The children soon warmed up to me. My gift of candies and Coca-Cola quickly got the youngest daughter on my side.

After introductions, Madaree steered me and my Thai assistant into the yard and sat me on a carpet spread under a hand-built wooden shelter. 

As the children swarmed around us, Madaree lit the coals on two small burners. He then connected two electric fans to the power cable snaking out of the house and pointed them at the coals.

Soon we had enough heat to begin cooking the vast pile of seafood we had bought earlier in the day at a border-town market.

As I squatted on the carpet, the food started to flow: crabs, shrimp, clams, and fish that I didn’t recognize but was happy to eat.

A local journalist and his girlfriend joined us, and still the food kept coming. I groaned as my host pushed more crab on my plate.

This is one of the great joys of working in this corner of the world. You can nearly always find some decent food when you’re out reporting. In fact, you often come away singing the praises of the local cuisine.

The delicious blend of flavors and styles testifies to the multiples of ethnicities, cultures, and races that call Southeast Asia home.

Of course, food can also be a divider, a marker of who stands where.

In southern Thailand, Muslims tend to eat at their own restaurants, not only because it’s prepared according to “halal” standards, but because they like this style of food, which is heavily influenced by Malay cooking.

Aom, my Thai assistant on this trip, a Buddhist from northern Thailand, is an enthusiastic convert to Malay-Muslim cuisine.

From the moment we touched down in Narathiwat, she was sizing up the food options and mapping out our mealtimes. Her local knowledge of curry houses and coffee shops was uncanny.

At one roadside stop, I sampled an unforgettable rice dish – the house specialty – that blended flakes of coconut, chili, and other herbs.

Aom explained that it was named for Her Majesty Queen Sirikit, who has a summer palace in southern Thailand. Apparently this Muslim-owned restaurant was the exclusive palace caterer for this dish.

After all the grim stories of religious tensions and fraying bonds, this was something to cheer. A Buddhist monarch requesting Malay-Muslim food is a small start, but in food-obsessed Thailand, it’s not a bad one.