Our impression on Mother’s Day set at Ruen Nappagao, Workshop’s new tasting menu and Park Hyatt’s chocolatecentric afternoon tea.
Ruen Noppagao celebrates Mother’s Day with a special menu
Ruen Nappagao, Bangkok Air Catering’s new Thai restaurant, serves a 10-course set menu in celebration of Mother’s Day. If you want to go big to show appreciation to your mum, this may just do the trick.
The set menu (B1,500++ per person) has 15 items, starting with refreshing sips of welcome drink Mali son klin, which comes with a perfume bottle should you want to add a floral scent. Up next is the amuse-bouche of Chor muang, jasmine-shaped dumpling, which impresses with its tiny petals and delicate stuffing of crab meat.
Definitely get your camera ready for Crispy pancake with crab meat, which arrives in a wooden box and filled with coconut smoke for a tropical (and dramatic) touch. This savoury showpiece of a starter is a much fancier version of khanom buang, befitting its royal recipe status.
Yum yai, one of the recipes praised in a poem by King Rama II, is a tasty jumble of different textures and flavours, including dried squid, pork skin, shredded chicken, assorted crisp veggies and more. It contains a big variety of ingredients, living up to its name, and doesn’t taste as sharp as your average yum but it’s meant to be that way.
Gai ob fang or Grilled chicken stuffed with sticky rice is a prelude to heartier part of the set. Aromatic sticky rice cooked with herbs and grains is stuffed between chicken crispy skin and tender meat.
Another time-honoured royal recipe is Gaeng jued kai nok krasa or sago consomme soup. The sago pearls envelop salted eggs inside, resembling a stork egg. The soothing soup is followed by Kuay tiew
brahm or sen yai flat noodle stir-fried with curry paste. Slices of long yard beans go great with spicy noodle, which is topped with a sizeable piece of grilled sea bass.
The main part of the set consists of rice steamed in coconut water and four dishes; Tamarind chilli dip with assorted organic veggies, Red curry with raw banana and grilled pork neck, Crispy gourami fish and Stir-fried cowslip creeper with egg. The rice is mildly sweet but isn’t overwhelming and goes well with all four dishes. The juicy pork neck isn’t overshadowed by the aromatic curry. The gourami fish is audibly crunchy as you sink your teeth into it but doesn’t taste oily. The fish is specially sourced as it needs to be female preparing to lay eggs in order to deliver optimum flavour.
Jasmine panna cotta looks all sugary but it hides citrus touch of yuzu jelly in the centre while the top layer of lychee and rose sauce gives off sweet and sour mix. The last course is musgod, a Thai-style egg cake topped with
anchan-infused meringue, and a tea to refresh.
Kanin Sinpan, Ruen Nappagao’s award-winning chef manager, is very knowledgeable of Thai ancient cuisine and where he sources his ingredients from. He can tell you stories of everything he serves or from where does he gets his fish sauce and what’s so special about it.
So is it 10-across-the-board for this 10-course set? The variety, quantity, quality and presentation justify the price tag. The sago balls with salted egg inside may be a tad chewy but I have nothing else to really nitpick about.
Ruen Nappagao offers an impressive set menu in a sophisticated setting for mums and their kids who would like to discover rare recipes from Thai cookbook together. The Mother’s Day set menu is available daily from today until Aug 12. J
Ruen Nappagao, Sathon Soi 6 / fb.com/ ruennoppagaorestaurant, 02-116-3317.