Restaurants

[Mai-Kee]

.... Istanbul....??

[Bit Beefy]

.... Istanbul....??

Lets follow suit put some money in and open up a Chipy

[SPIRIT CRUSHER]

yea im with ya beefy on opening up a chip shop over there, i don't mind thai food but i can't eat there the whole time an i get sick of mcdonalds.

[Guest]

Everything depends on your price limit and who you are taking. Most Thai LBs do NOT like farang food. In my list below, my experience, after having taken at least 100 LBs to these places is that LBs only like Thai, or some Italian. The Soi 23 is a new place, very, very nice decor, excellent food, very cool tiny bar area.

If there isn't a limit and you want the best, these are Tops:

1. Faces - Soi 38, Indian and Thai, but take Indian. Totally awesome decoration.

2. Sirocco - Top of Summit Tower. Most spectacular view in the world, really, for a restaurant.

3. Maha Naga - Thai. Soi 29. Near Sukhumit. Thai fusion. Excellent food, decor.

4. L'Opera - Italian. Soi 39, near end. Best manager in Bangkok.

5. Giusto - Italian. Soi 23, near Soi Cowboy. One of the better all round Italians.

6. Philippe's - French. Soi 39, half-way down. Best French value / $.

7. Normandy - Oriental Hotel. Top Floor. Jacket / tie required. Rated top restaurant in Bangkok.
French. I don't agree, but it is very good and spectacular view.

etc, etc....

[These are all high-end, but well worth it, expect 250 Baht/wine, about 2000/baht each for dinner with wine]

[Guest]

there is a little restaurant on suk across from nana that I believe is called club 99 the food is wonderful and they have a live band (usually from the Philipines) to get to this place just go from Dynasty towards NEP cross over suk to the other side make a right and go down about one or two sois you cant miss the place it is next to the barber shop that always has the little midget standing in front of it. The food atmosphere and women in there are top notch

[Mai-Kee]

Hahaha..... that's really funny, I wouldn't thought that anyone realized this weired bar. It's called "Check In 99" and if I remember correctly it's owned by some Norwegians (that's already kind of freaky enough in BKK ....LOL), with a sleazy 50ies/70ies deco and an all-girls Filipina band. Aging hookers, weired customers....FANTASTIC!!! And the most fascinating thing is that you might passed by 1 million times already and haven't recognized it. It is in the middle of the action and you feel you are on another planet! Actually it looks a bit like a James Bond movie-set, directed by Ed Woods....
I would never recommend it for it's food, but it's cranky atmosphere is hilarious!!!

MK

[oilbaron]

There are millions, but I can't stand Thai food so I don't know any! I'm sure loads of people here do though...

If this thread gets a few good responses I'll move it to the travel section!

Your Still noy inyo the food Stoogie.......    I miss it... Thai food here in the UK Just aint the same.....

Any decent chippy's in Bkk  

Sorry    

Fish an chips in suk soi 25, other end of cowboy, cant say i ever tried them so dont know what they are like but noticed them last week, looks ok.

[olekunde]

why not eat on the street. in pattaya, they have probably the most spicy and tasty southern thai food you will come across. located in soi buakao right before soi diana. opens about 6pm. for those who enjoy isaan food, try pattaya tai soi 15. they got most of the north-eastern dishes in the stalls there.
i am not so familar wih bkk, but there are a indoor thai style restaurant right before the entrance of patpong 2/suriwong rd.
also, the small soi that connects soi 7 and soi 5 in sukhumvit has some stalls with lots variety.

[stogie bear]

There are millions, but I can't stand Thai food so I don't know any! I'm sure loads of people here do though...

If this thread gets a few good responses I'll move it to the travel section!

Your Still noy inyo the food Stoogie.......    I miss it... Thai food here in the UK Just aint the same.....

Any decent chippy's in Bkk  

Sorry    

Fish an chips in suk soi 25, other end of cowboy, cant say i ever tried them so dont know what they are like but noticed them last week, looks ok.

Soi 23 - It connects to The Offshore bar. The chips are 100% authentic 'chippy' chips! The rest of their stuff is mediocre!

Here is a photo what what it looks like from the inside looking out into Soi 23!

[Guest]

Aging hookers, weired customers....FANTASTIC!!! And the most fascinating thing is that you might passed by 1 million times already and haven't recognized it. It is in the middle of the action and you feel you are on another planet! Actually it looks a bit like a James Bond movie-set, directed by Ed Woods....

I'm buying if we can ever hook up for a few there, Mai-kee

[oilbaron]

There are millions, but I can't stand Thai food so I don't know any! I'm sure loads of people here do though...

If this thread gets a few good responses I'll move it to the travel section!

Your Still noy inyo the food Stoogie.......    I miss it... Thai food here in the UK Just aint the same.....

Any decent chippy's in Bkk  

Sorry    

Fish an chips in suk soi 25, other end of cowboy, cant say i ever tried them so dont know what they are like but noticed them last week, looks ok.

Soi 23 - It connects to The Offshore bar. The chips are 100% authentic 'chippy' chips! The rest of their stuff is mediocre!

Here is a photo what what it looks like from the inside looking out into Soi 23!

Luckily Stogie knows his stuff, i could send you looking for days!!

[allstar88]

i quite like eating japanese in los as its quite cheap compared to jap food in uk, and its not all raw sushi theres some nice cooked dishes,try the shopping malls in bangkok,they all have cheap jap food,vietnam food is available too,which is tasty apart from the salads(rabbit food),i also reccomend mk restaurants,with thier big electric stew bowls .  after lb my second vice in los is the food   Daz.

[Mai-Kee]

Best Japanese food at Soi Thanya! Only there you get the real stuff and the neckless full-body tatooed guys look that their bosses get it real fresh otherwise the chef will be slized himself into sushi format......

MK

[PigDogg]

From today's NY Times:



http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/12/dining/12bang.html

October 12, 2005
On the Streets of Bangkok, Two Guys Keep It Real
By R. W. APPLE Jr.
BANGKOK

THE guidebooks touted Bed Supperclub, where the hip and beautiful recline while they eat, and the airline magazine featured the Australian Amanda Gale, who has set the town on its ear with her fusion food at Cy'an. But I was looking for something more traditional, so as soon as I had settled into my hotel room, I picked up the phone and called Robert Halliday, an American writer and gourmand who has lived here so long that he finds vacations without Thai food painful.

"Welcome back to Bangkok," he said. "Prepare to eat like a shark."

Soon, he and I, a pair of ample fellows, were accordioned into the back of a not-so-ample taxi, en route to Chote Chitr, a modest establishment with only five tables, near the famous temple, Wat Suthat. "You won't believe the banana-flower salad," he enthused as we wove through the city's notorious traffic. "It's one of the wonders of the world, up there with the late Beethoven quartets."

A few years ago, Mr. Halliday had promised me an eating spree for the ages, but he had taken ill shortly after my wife, Betsey, and I arrived. This time would prove to be different, as he led us into a hidden world of restaurants. At every stop, we were the only Western customers. And at every stop, the food was cheap, simple and delicious.

With heavy teak chairs and gleaming black-and-white tiles, Chote Chitr reflects the quiet pride of a family that has owned it for a century. Its clients are middle-class Thais, who can choose from no fewer than 400 dishes. We didn't sample them all, but all things considered (such as the fact that this was lunch, not dinner) we gave a fairly decent account of ourselves.

After a few crisp, garlicky wontons, we moved straight to mee krob, the sticky, sweet-and-spicy fried noodles found on Thai menus from Delhi to Des Moines. These were another matter altogether: subtler, tarter, zestier. The secret, Mr. Halliday quickly explained, was peel from a rare, sourish citrus fruit called som saa.

The banana-flower salad was stunning indeed, another example of a standard transformed. Prawns, chicken and the shredded red buds of the banana tree, among other things, went into the dish, but its brilliance, as with all the best Thai dishes, lay in the complexity of its seasonings - sour in the front of the mouth (tamarind pulp), fiery in the back (dried chilies), and sweetly nutty at the top (coconut cream). Eating it left me punch-drunk with pleasure.

There was wonderful tom yum pla, that eye-poppingly vibrant fish soup. Hot, rich and sharp, it owed everything to the liltingly fresh, vividly perfumed lemon grass, ka-prao or holy basil, coriander and kaffir lime leaves that flavored it, along with the obligatory chili. A mildly piquant vegetable curry, too (still made from a paste prepared by hand every day). And a small wok-fried bass. But for me, the pièce de résistance was a salad made from long green eggplants, makheua yao, heady with smoke from the grill, plus shrimp, red shallots and palm sugar. An addictive sour tang was added by fermented shrimp and lime juice.

For dessert, Mr. Halliday dashed around the corner to buy sticky rice, cooked in coconut cream and coconut sugar, at Kor Panich, the city's oldest sweet shop. We ate it with Okrong mangoes, perhaps the world's most succulent and least fibrous. No point in going overboard here, but I can't imagine a better dessert; it was an ideal finish to a meal of Thai classics, cooked with consummate finesse, with a whole array of bitter, spicy, nutty, sweet, salty and sour flavors in perfect balance and harmony.

Mr. Halliday, who is 62, was born in Englewood, N.J., and studied James Joyce and Russian at Columbia. Modern music and exotic languages have always been his things; although his French and his Italian (except for musical terminology) have never been very good, he learned Hungarian to read Bela Bartok, and his Thai is so fluent that it startles native speakers.

After working in bookstores, at The Washington Post and at the Library of Congress, he took his severance pay when his job at the library was eliminated and went to Bangkok, staying at first with the family of a Washington friend. From time to time, he returned to the United States, but about 1986, he told me, "I decided I didn't want to live anywhere that didn't have durian" - the remarkably smelly Thai fruit.

Gradually, he began writing on a variety of topics for the Bangkok Post, holding forth about favorite modern composers, including Berio, Boulez, Dallapiccola and Elliott Carter, and about film, another of his passions. He has a multilingual collection of more than 2,000 DVD's.

Curiously, he never signs his real name to his work, and he has resisted repeated urgings to compile his profound knowledge of the history and intricacies of Thai food in a book. He styles himself Electric Eel (the Thai words escape me) for film reviews, and in a long spell as restaurant reviewer, he used the self-deprecating pen name Ung-aang Talay, which means Sea Toad.

Asked to explain, he replied, "I don't like to see my name in print."

Although shy and gentle in manner like the Thais among whom he lives, Mr. Halliday harbors strong opinions about Thai food, which he expresses pungently. Thai restaurants abroad, he insisted, inevitably suffer from inferior ingredients. (He is not alone; David Thompson, the chef at Nahm, an extraordinary outpost of Thai gourmandise in London, flies supplies in from Asia every week for the same reason.) The limes are too thick-skinned, in his view, the herbs are dull, and the peppers, even when grown from imported Thai seeds, lack the authentic, in-your-kisser flavor and aroma.

Drive around with him, eat with him, and you soon know what contempt he feels for much that he sees in modern Bangkok. Passing a KFC outlet, he uncharacteristically growled, "The restaurant that was there used to serve the best duck and noodles in town." Discussing the bland, prettified, hopelessly dumbed-down version of Thai food served in local tourist traps, he summed it up as "chicken à la king with a kaffir lime leaf floating on top."

But with the help of a remarkably heterogeneous group of friends, including taxi drivers and farmers as well as intellectuals, he still finds much that is genuine. Some of his discoveries have become widely known because he has championed them, like Polo Fried Chicken, a joint near the polo club in the diplomatic quarter. Once a humble three-table stall, it now has an air-conditioned if garishly lighted dining room down the street, to which a corps of waiters ferries platters of explosively hot green papaya salad, shredded beef fried with palm sugar and fish sauce and larb moo, chopped pork flavored with mint, to feed hordes of workers from nearby offices at lunch.

All good, but what pulls them in is the chicken. Brined and liberally dusted with black pepper, it is fried until golden-brown, crisp but not dry and papery, then showered with garlic, also fried. One of the marvels of this world-class dish is the succulence of the chicken; another is the sweetness of the garlic, unmarred by burned bits.

I cede the final word to Betsey, a student of the genre like all true Southerners. "The best fried chicken I've ever eaten," she said as we plowed through a second platter. I think she might have danced with delight if she had not been too busy eating.

CHUA KIM HENG, a noisy five-story poultry palace jammed between a freeway and an electrical substation, epitomizes much that the Thais fancy in their restaurants. It is starkly utilitarian, with no idle decorative flourishes, it is known for one dish - in its case, roast goose and duck - and its food is cooked by Thais of Chinese descent. Most are Teochow, with roots on the southeastern China coast, like many of their brethren in Vietnamese and Singaporean restaurants.

Here the overture was khanom jeeb, steamed dumplings with exquisitely thin wrappers, served with tiny green Thai chilies with a slight floral scent and a nuclear kick. (In pedagogic mode, Mr. Halliday warned, "Not too much chili, or it will blot out the other flavors, like looking into the sun when you're trying to study a Monet.")

We ordered goose, steamed first to minimize fat, then braised. A plate of sliced dark meat came to the table, no bones in sight, bathed in a thin sauce flavored with anise, black pepper and galangal, a ginger-like root. Fresh coriander on top and a condiment of pickled chili and garlic on the side pointed up the lusciousness of the goose. Cabbage in a sauce sharpened by lime and sesame came on the side as well.

With no drinks, dinner for three was $17.50. But in Bangkok as everywhere else, delicacies do cost more. At Pen, for example, a mirror-walled, family-friendly place that serves scrumptious white wood mushrooms, parrot fish deep-fried and surrounded by sambals (green mango shreds in tamarind sauce, fried and raw shallots and the like), and astonishingly tender river prawns, nearly a foot long, deliciously charred over charcoal, the seafood prices are five times those at the eateries along the Chao Phraya river. "Everything here is fresher and bigger," said Mr. Halliday, who celebrates birthdays at Pen. Worth every baht, but beyond the means of many Thais.

Even plates of noodles can be expensive. Not at Thip Samai, a storefront noodle shop near the Golden Mount that produces a definitive pad thai, free of the sweetness that often disfigures it in the West. But at Raan Jay Fai, a few doors down, in a banal setting of fluorescent bulbs, hospital-green walls and linoleum-topped tables, an elderly, balletic cook wearing a kind of knitted snood and working at a charcoal brazier turns out luxury pad khee mao, at a price. She allows her rice noodles, broad ones, to catch a bit in the wok, giving them a pleasantly seared taste, adds basil leaves and then dumps in prime seafood, including heroic lumps of crab meat that reminded me of Chesapeake Bay, what Mr. Halliday called "shrimps as big as sheep," and fresh hearts of palm.

The thrifty, persnickety locals, who consider cheap, tasty noodles their birthright, term these "millionaire's food." Three servings cost about $18.50.

Mr. Halliday had words of measured praise for a few fancy places, like the funky Asiatique, whose custardy tofu and mellow yellow crab curry we had admired, and the sybaritic Celadon, whose elegant food exhibits "all the tastes and subtleties Thais appreciate," in the words of its chef, Khun Veera. But he is a populist at heart.

So on the last day of our visit, we ate lunch on the run at the splendid Aw Taw Kaw market, a food-lover's must-see with heaps of gorgeous tropical fruit, schools of brightly colored shellfish and bubbling caldrons of curry. It was raining, and the plastic roof was leaking, but our guru cried happily, "Try this!" when he spied an aromatic green curry whose sauce, as he observed, had been carefully cooked to prevent the coconut oil from rising to the surface. He insisted that we taste a gang som or sour curry made from lotus stems, a lip-smacking eggplant stir-fry, crab steamed in a banana leaf with coconut cream and curry spices, and some meltingly tender pork satay.

We did as we were told, and soon we scarcely noticed the rain.

[Snick]

LOL - I was just about to paste that link !!!
I can't wait to try out all these places. I have been to the Goose place and it is amazing.