Where to eat in Bangkok
From irresistible street food to five-star fine dining.
In Bangkok, it’s as easy to find outstanding street food as it is to end up in one of those tourist traps with a menu in dozens of languages. However, alongside the street food, there’s a new generation of Thai chefs who are making every effort to get the most out of local ingredients. Their idea of fine dining doesn’t involve buying in expensive foreign ingredients, such as truffles and caviar, but rather using fresh local fish, vegetables, and spices. The new wave of baristas also follow the same philosophy, brewing their filtered coffee from delicately roasted Siamese beans. Today, there are quite a few artisan coffee shops serving refreshingly sweet iced coffee alongside the traditional cafés. Together with all the innovative, new restaurants, they’re part of an up-and-coming, ambitious food scene in Bangkok.
Best in Asia
Le Du
Le Du was recently crowned as the best fine dining establishment in Asia by the food guide “The World’s 50 Best”. The owner, Chef Thitid Tassanakajohn, or “Chef Ton” as he’s more commonly known as, is the proud owner of seven other restaurants in Thailand. However, Le Du, whose name means “season” in Thai, is the one that most clearly reflects his philosophy when it comes to food preparation. The menu changes based on the seasonal availability of ingredients. Although the dishes, which are prepared from fresh, local ingredients, are traditional Thai, the presentation is modern and innovative. An entrée may, for example, be based on a hot and sour tom yum but be served in a different form than soup. While he’s a celebrity jury member on the TV show Top Chef, Chef Ton hasn’t let the fame go to his head.
Street food with a Michelin star
Jay Fai
As Jay Fai is the only food stand in Bangkok to ever be awarded a Michelin star, the hype is enormous. Every day, customers eagerly spend hours in long lines outside the stall and by lunchtime, the waiting list is already full. In the kitchen, or rather behind the wok, a resolute Chef Jay Fai stands adorned in her familiar get-up: ski goggles, beret, and lipstick. She’s 77 years old but still works from 9 am to 9 pm four days a week and never takes a lunch break, subsisting on a diet of Coke and water. If you pay a visit, for around SEK 400, try the signature dish, crab omelette, which has a thick, fluffy pastry crust around generous chunks of crab meat. Everything else is also delicious, including the noodle and wok dishes.
Edible tales
Potong
Potong is located in a former pharmacy in Bangkok’s Chinatown district and has retained much of the original decor. Chef Pam, Pichaya Soontornyanakij, prepares food inspired by her Thai-Chinese background from the four basic elements: saltiness, acidity, hotness, and texture. She combines this with the end product of the Maillard reaction (a chemical reaction where carbohydrates react with amino acids to form compounds that are appealing to the senses – for example, the smell and taste of freshly browned bread or meat). The waiters serve each meal accompanied by vivid storytelling. As if that’s not enough, the chefs make their own fermenting and pickling fluids, which are lined up on display outside the cramped kitchen. On the top floor, there’s a cocktail bar with DJs and drinks. Both Chef Pam and the restaurant itself have received several awards. Among other things, she was the youngest chef and first woman to be awarded a star in the Michelin guide, which singled her establishment out as the “Restaurant opening of the year”.
Simple and laid-back
Baan restaurant ”Thai family recipe”
Bangkok
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This is another one of Chef Ton’s restaurants, but it’s considerably more relaxed and unpretentious. Here, you can eat fish cakes, spicy whole chili-seasoned fish, wok-grilled leafy vegetables, laab (a Laotian meat salad), or glass noodles with shrimp, mangoes, sticky rice, and coconut milk. You’ll feel like you’re eating in the home of a Thai family – who know how to cook. While the dishes are simple, they’re exquisitely prepared with balanced tastes and fine ingredients. The presentation is simple but always appealing to look at.
Danish coffee
La Cabra
The Copenhagen-based coffee roastery, La Cabra, recently opened a new location in Bangkok. The decor is Scandinavian modern, with cement and wood furniture and artsy ceramic coffee cups, and the coffee is superb. While the menu is limited, the items are both delicious and esthetically pleasing. Croissants and perfectly symmetrical brownies in a number of different flavors are lined up on the countertop. On the whole, the coffee scene in Bangkok is vibrant, with the Hario Café Asian flagship store, Chef Gaggan Anand’s CDGRE, BrewLab with its Aeropress champion, and two different Kurasu locations.
Best joints in Chinatown
Chinatown
Aside from La Cabra and Potong, you’ll also find a number of street food stands and unpretentious restaurants in Bangkok’s Chinatown district. You can buy flattened, dried squid from a cart or enjoy generously sized oyster omelettes at Krua Porn La Mai (590 592 Charoen Krung Rd., Samphanthawong) that would set you back several hundred kronor in Sweden. The omelettes can be ordered sautéed or – if you don’t mind the extra calories in the name of taste – deep fried, and the fresh eggs make the oysters go down easier. Another specialty, which you can also find at Jay Fai, is the crispy rice noodles with shellfish and vegetables, served piping hot with a ladle-full of gravy. The more adventurous members of your group will enjoy a visit to Khao Tom Jay Suay (547 ถนน พลับพลาไชย แขวง ป้อมปราบฯ Pom Prap Sattru Phai), where they can try Thai delicacies such as crispy, deep-fried pork intestines, pungent pork blood pudding, and chewy duck intestines.
An extraordinary experience
Gaggan Anand
The eccentric Gaggan Anand is an energetic, creative force whose fine dining establishment can best be described as a Thai version of the trendy Stockholm restaurant Punk Royale. The guests sit in a row around the open kitchen, where Anand entertains them like a loquacious ringmaster. He calls the culinary experience a “shit show where anything can happen:” at times, you’ll be treated to ear-shattering rock music, on other occasions, he’ll deliver a meandering spiel that begins with Adam and Eve and adjourns with a barbecue fiesta. Almost everything is centered around storytelling, and no dish gets served without a message being presented – like the eggplant with jet-black sauce, which is meant to put egg on the face of all the social media influencers: “Ha ha, now we’ve prepared a shitty dish that can’t be photographed!” While some of the items are a little over the top, they still taste fantastic.
Spicy but delicious
Krua Ja Yan 2
Just northwest of the city, the island Ko Kret is encircled by a river. Next to the pier where the boats cross, you’ll find a makeshift restaurant packed full of locals, with a number of large groups and families. As the menu simply consists of a notebook with photos of the entrées pasted in, you’ll want to ask for advice on what to order. Thankfully, almost everything is good – and spicy. While the spiciness approaches the five-alarm level of Isan cuisine from northeast Thailand, it’s so delicious you can’t help but want more. Some of the dishes worth trying include the wonderful tom yum, the salty rice porridge congee, the glass noodle and shrimp wok, the different kinds of fish curries, and the searingly spicy squid wok with leafy vegetables.
Text by Sara Berg