The ultimate guide to eating out in Bangkok
With its mix of street food stalls and Michelin-starred restaurants, no city, except perhaps Mexico City, offers the range of food Bangkok does
With its mix of countless street food stalls that mushroom in the evenings with fold-up tables and stools and high-end Michelin starred restaurants, there is no other city, except for Mexico City perhaps, that offers the range of eating options that Bangkok does. Plenty of cultish hype abounds as well. There’s a restaurant with a billboard of a chef who has appeared on a Netflix series, another with a bar menu with mostly baffling headings such as acid and expression gins. When I saw a to-let sign for a shophouse, which declared it would make the ideal “Portuguese-styled shophouse bar", it seemed to mark a peak of the Bangkok shophouse trend.
At the acclaimed Opium Bar, for instance, one climbs up several flights of stairs in a converted pharmacy and medicine shop of the owner’s family to a rooftop with panoramic views of Chinatown. The cocktails menu, titled “Liquid Surreality", is akin to a botanical encyclopaedia. The cocktail Eyes Wide Shut offers “mezcal washed with vegan cheese, smoked pine cordial, chili kimchi and paprika tonic". I drank a Dawn or Dusk, a mix of Roku gin, oolong liqueur, nitro yerba mate tea and “maybe Japanese mint". The cocktail comes with the disclosure that “it was impossible to capture the atmosphere in the farm in one drink because the early morning gives a very different vibe to when the sun is setting." Inevitably, given the challenge of meditating on sunrise and sunset before deciding on your cocktail, we spent a lot of time asking in-house expert Celina Kuninaka for advice. The vivacious Singaporean also gave us excellent suggestions for dinner in Chinatown.
At one end of the spectrum are restaurants such as Suhring, run by German twin brothers, where a tasting menu of painterly elegant European food starts at 7,500 baht, and the Italian restaurant Zanotti, still excellent decades after it opened. At the other end are countless outstanding food stalls such as the som tum (papaya salad) outlet at Or Tor Kor market, akin to a pilgrimage site for food lovers for decades.
I had decided to concentrate on Asian food and arrived with shortlists from Chinese cookbook writer and former BBC presenter Ken Hom and David Thompson, the founding chef at Nahm and author of three cookbooks on Thai food. Early on, we abandoned our ambitious list of tourist sites to visit and gave in to “eating like little piggies" as the friend I was travelling with put it.
Emblematic of the sheer range of cuisines on offer in Bangkok were the first two meals that we ate at the Malaysian Nyonya restaurant Jyak & Lym and the Cantonese restaurant Hei Yin.
Each floor of Jyak & Lym, inevitably a shophouse with steep stairs, has a different colour palette dreamed up by a modern-day Henri Matisse. I have not eaten more memorable Peranakan food, the cuisine of the early Chinese migrants to Penang and Malacca, outside of Malaysia. Fish with a fried crust flavoured with turmeric and kaffir lime leaf had me scraping the bottom of the dish before it was cleared away.
Hei Yin accommodated us on a rainy Saturday afternoon even though we arrived after last orders. Both the spinach shrimp dimsum and the flat rice rolls with barbecued pork transported me back to Hong Kong, where I worked for almost half of my career. Its baked pastry puff with duck breast filling should be exported to Parisian patisseries as a protein-rich equivalent of the pain au chocolat.
Decades ago, the great American food writer Jeffrey Steingarten invented the Cephalopod Index as a kind of proxy for a culture’s acceptance of diverse foods. Thailand, then and now, would score very high: Cuttlefish, squid and octopus, which were constituents of the Steingarten index, are everywhere.
On this trip, I arbitrarily decided a raw seafood salad index would be a measure of how good a restaurant’s seafood offerings were. At Thai restaurant Charmgang, the crispy samphire with crab salad was a revelation. Also irresistible was the sugar-cane smoked pork jowl salad with sour mango, the tartness setting off the sweetness.
While Thai food overseas, especially in India, has a predictability to its curry sauces, eating in Bangkok opens one up to a world of “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" that long predates the 2017 best-seller by that name by the Californian food writer Samin Nosrat.
At another high-end Thai restaurant, Samrub Samrub chef Prin Polsuk does two sittings a night with a set menu focused on regions of Thailand. They have an unusual take on the humble rice porridge (congee) and the grilled coral grouper came with a memorable mushroom relish and fermented leaves. Samrub Samrub adheres to the virtues of eating local but in an admirably unpretentious way; the set menu for 4,290 baht per head, excluding service and taxes, is the shortest I have ever read and avoids the virtue signalling that too many high-end restaurants seem to delight in.
No trip to Bangkok for me is complete without a visit to Sri Trat, named after the owner’s mother, a former beauty queen, and featuring her recipes from the eastern region of Thailand. A huge mural portrait of the owner’s mother adorns one of the restaurant’s walls. The grilled pork neck, a staple of Thai food,was also among the best I have ever eaten. The barracuda marinated in lime with mint leaves and lettuce was their utterly more-ish entry to the seafood salad competition.
After this trip, if someone puts a plate of ceviche before me, like Proust with his madeleine, I will instead think wistfully of the fish salads of Sri Trat and Charmgang.
By day four, I noticed the friend I was travelling with was looking with alarm at my endless foraging from the marathon of a breakfast buffet that the Sukhothai Hotel, where we were staying, offers every morning. My sampling concluded with passion fruit and tamarind sorbets at the ice cream bar, after eggs, smoked salmon and labneh, and, an additional daily sweet treat, a finger of French toast with a flavour bomb of a crème brulee core.
He was heading to the airport while I still had another meal ahead of me, a return to Chinatown to David Thompson’s two-year-old Chop Chop Cook Shop. Heroically, and only in the interests of fully reporting this article, your correspondent feasted on pork ear terrine with a delicate chili-vinegar dressing and addictive prawn wontons followed by roast pork and duck.
After four days of eating in Bangkok, two things became clear. One is the influence of Thompson on high-end Thai cuisine: both Samrub Samrub and Charmgang are helmed by chefs who credit working with him at Nahm in Bangkok and London to “modernising traditional Thai recipes" as the trio of chefs at Charmgang put it. The second is more personal and a public health warning.
There is such a thing as Bangkok belly, but it comes not from problems with hygiene—even the street food sets a high standard for sparkling cleanliness—but from greed. I have tried intermittent fasting since my return, but still don’t believe my weighing scale.
Rahul Jacob is a former travel food and drink editor for the Financial Times, London, and author of Right of Passage, a collection of travel essays.
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