I’M SO GLAD WE FINALLY MET
The menu at Met Cafe in Thong Lor is built around home-styled recipes specially crafted from the owner’s favourite dishes
‘It’s a shame that I passed by this restaurant every day and never considered checking it out,” I said to my friend during our first lunch visit to Met Cafe.
At first, the eatery — which opened two years ago on the ground floor of Metta, a well-loved fashion house — seemed nothing more than just a pastime speciality of another fashion designer.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not implying that food crafted by stylishly-clad people in the fashion industry is less commendable than that of the cooking pros. Beautiful people tend to have a taste for the finer things in life and cooking is another one of their means to express it.
With that being said, over the past years, the world’s top-tier fashion authorities have been venturing into the food service space. Take Louis Vuitton’s Le Café V in Osaka; Gold by Dolce & Gabbana in Milan; Beige by Chanel in Tokyo; Rose by Comme des Garcons in London; 1921 Gucci in Shanghai; and Ralph’s by Ralph Lauren In New York, as examples.
In Thailand, this trend was established long before that, with our very own pioneer Greyhound, which opened its first restaurant in 1998.
Since then, numerous Thai fashion figures have also been showcasing their artistic distinction in the restaurant industry. Hence, to me, it seemed that Metta was also trying to be on this bandwagon.
Spank me for such an unfair prejudgment, if you may.
The food at Met Cafe proved to be so delicious and comforting that during the meal I kept planning to return. And to find a good excuse for that was easy.
Unless you come with a large group of gluttonous friends, sampling all of Met Cafe’s highlights in one go may be impossible. Every single dish on the 75-item menu is worthy of ordering. None of the dishes are an afterthought or simply there to beautify the selection (don’t let the gimmicky titles of some dishes downplay their palatable value).
A couple weeks later, I found myself at Met Cafe again for dinner.
Met Cafe’s menu is built around homestyle recipes crafted from the owners’ favourite dishes. There are three owners here: designer Metta Tantisajjatham and her two avid foodie partners.
The venture came about after relentless requests for Metta, who’s also a passionate cook, to open a restaurant so her friends wouldn’t have to wait for her to host a dinner party.
French onion soup (320 baht), the first dish to hit our table, may sound quintessential should you be a fashion designer and want to offer something humble and French. However, despite the cliché, Met Cafe’s richly-flavoured rendition, prepared with beef broth, proved second to none.
A genteel but far more exciting dish is rocket soup (250 baht). Every sip of this creamy, bright green emulsion, made with heaps of fresh arugula leaves organically grown in Metta’s backyard garden in Khao Yai, provides soothing pleasure which is complemented by spinach gratin toast served on the side.
Crab cake Benedict salad (390 baht), a scrumptious marriage between a meaty crab cake and egg Benedict that comes in a form of fresh green salad with Hollandaise sauce, is another dish worth starting your meal with.
But if I had to choose my favourite starter, it would absolutely be fritto misto di mare, an assortment of deep-fried seafood (550 baht).
The menu takes cues from the owners’ favourite dish during their trips to Italy’s Amalfi Coast.
“We loved it so much that we ordered the dish from almost every restaurant we visited. We ate it every day until we could recognise the better ones from the others,” Metta said.
Her rendering, served with house-made tartare sauce, include sand whiting, smelts, calamari, tiger prawn, zucchini and carrot, all lightly-battered and deep-fried to perfectly retain their crispiness.
The cafe’s braised oxtail (650 baht) is among Bangkok’s best. The oxtail was slow-cooked with beer in a cast-iron pot for four hours until it exhibited a tender texture and had a pleasant chew. But the highlight was the gravy reduction, which blended a nice bitter tang of burnt beef bones with naturally sweet beef juice.
Spicy angel hair pasta with crabmeat and bird’s eye chilli (390 baht) and penne pad sa-taw with stink beans and grilled prawn (390 baht) are highly recommended for pasta fans.
Otherwise, sharing a platter of African rhapsody grilled chicken (590 baht), prepared to a well-preserved Parisian recipe, is guaranteed to entice you with its deliciously unique combination of ingredients and tastes.
The cafe’s pho noodles soup with Australian beef rib eye (350 baht) is regarded among noodle aficionados in Bangkok as one of the city’s best.
An additional menu featuring khao tomstyled delicacies is on offer from 6pm. The taste is gourmet but prices are street-level.
Expect to find on the menu a variety of classic entrées to be enjoyed with boiled rice soup (free of charge), including sautéed minced pork with salt-cured Chinese olive (220 baht); sour and spicy three-way egg salad (180 baht); minced pork in pickled plum consomme (180 baht); pickled crab (280-950 baht); stewed duck (250 baht); and sautéed eggplant with minced pork (220 baht).
Met Cafe is also a paradise for Western-styled dessert and homemade ice cream.
I highly recommend peach crumble (350 baht) and banana butterscotch upside down tart with ice cream (350 baht). The latter was buttery luscious so much so that I found myself trying to fence my dining companions from having their share of the dish.
A dozen more sweet options worth sampling include English sticky toffee pudding, macadamia salted caramel cheese cake, lavender crème brûlée, apple croustade and toffee mousse cake.
Met Cafe’s homemade ice cream (120-150 baht) proved exceptionally good that it alone is worth opening a gourmet ice cream bar for.
The repertoire includes salted caramel, rum raisin, devil’s dark chocolate, fleur de sel caramel and diva sorbet, a concoction of raspberry, rose and lychee.
The clientele is a lovely mix of young professionals and families in the Sukhumvit neighbourhood. Quality of service is well above standard.