BANGKOK’S NEW BOUNTY
PUTTING A PREMIUM ON SUSTAINABLE LOCAL INGREDIENTS, A CLUTCH OF YOUNG BANGKOK-BASED CHEFS ARE REDEFINING THAI FOOD IN DISHES THAT ARE AS INVENTIVE AS THEY ARE DELICIOUS.
A clutch of young chefs in the Thai capital are driving the city’s second dining renaissance with dishes that are as inventive as they are delicious.
SOUND LIKE SACRILEGE, but the best Thai food in Bangkok is no longer found on the streets. Rather, it’s the domain of a new generation of intrepid and eco-conscious young chefs who draw their inspiration from Thai ingredients, age-old preservation techniques, family recipes, and the city itself. Bangkok has never been a more exciting place to eat than it is right now.
On my first trip to the city 14 years ago, street-food stalls and generations-old eateries were still the best options for a good feed of Thai food. If diners wanted something finer, washed down with a decent bottle of wine, there was little choice but to head to a five-star hotel, where over-designed restaurants with over-decorated tables dished up insipid curries for a clientele less interested in culinary virtuosity than in the promise of air conditioning.
Little had changed when my photographer husband, Terence, and I returned to Thailand to research a guidebook two years later. But when we settled into the capital in 2009, we found ourselves documenting a relentless five-year wave of chef-driven Thai restaurant openings like nothing Bangkok had seen before, kick-started by Thai-born Duangporn “Bo” Songvisava and her Australian husband Dylan Jones’s Bo.lan, Aussie-born Thai food master David Thompson’s Nahm, and American food writer Jarrett Wrisley’s Soul Food Mahanakorn. Not long after came Ian Kittichai’s Issaya Siamese Club, Danish chef Henrik Yde Andersen’s Sra Bua by Kiin Kiin, Bongkoch Satongun and her Aussie husband Jason Bailey’s Paste and Supanniga Eating Room, Le Du by New York–trained Thitid “Ton” Tassanakajohn, and Err by the Bo.lan team. Those groundbreaking eateries paved the way for a group of chefs who are now crafting some of the most inspired—and sustainable—food in the city. Here’s where to find them.
100 MAHASETH
Some of Bangkok’s most delicious Thai dishes await at year-old 100 Mahaseth, which occupies an unpretentious wooden house in one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, Charoenkrung. The focus here is nose-to-tail cuisine from Thailand’s northeastern Isan region, and the presentation is utterly beautiful. Bone marrow—roasted and buried in charcoal, topped with toasted perilla seeds, scallions, palm sugar, lime, and lemongrass, and plated on pebbles—is a muchInstagrammed dish. And it tastes as good as it looks, the fragrant lemongrass and smoky aromas preparing my senses for the crunch, zest, and rich creamy marrow to come.
Chefs Chalee Kader and Chaichat “Randy” Noprapa didn’t originally intend to open an Isan joint. The young partners had dreamed instead of a pho shop serving the Vietnamese soup they loved to slurp while studying together in California.
“We were going to use so many cuts and parts of the cow to make the pho broth and toppings, then use the offal, tails, and whatnot for other dishes,” Chalee explains. “We could really only do pho for lunch so I thought, which other cuisine used a lot of cow and pig? Isan. Every time we had Isan food growing up it felt like a feast with so much to share.” Kader and Noprapa decided on a menu that would make Bangkokians realize how deprived they’d been of authentic Isan food. Serendipitously, most of their kitchen team came from the region and from homes that ate well. The results are dishes such as fermented pork-rib soup, rice-field crab soup with fermented fish, and—one of my favorites—a hearty cassia-leaf curry with
braised oxtail, ya nang (a deep green leaf used in homey vegetable soups), and salted mackerel (another Isan favorite). Healthy and herbaceous, it’s thicker, richer, and more comforting than any I’ve sampled before.
“The research and our travels have been the core to our dish development and ideas,” Kader tells me. “I’m trying my best to dig for more knowledge. I still have a long way to go, but we’ll get there. The more I learn, the more I realize how the Isan way of life has changed the way I cook, use, preserve, and try not to waste foods.”
80/20
Just a few minutes’ walk from 100 Mahaseth via the shophouse-lined streets of the Talat Noi neghborhood, 80/20 is the casual diner of 35-year-old Thai chef Napol “Joe” Jantraget and his Japanese pastry chef wife Saki Hoshino. It’s named for the amount of local produce (80 percent) used in their contemporary Thai tasting menus.
The laidback space, which feels more like an arty café than a restaurant serving some of the city’s most elegant-looking food, closed for renovation just after I dined recently. When it reopens in November, the open kitchen will be larger, there will be a lab for experimentation, as well as a room for the preservation, pickling, and fermentation Jantraget has been doing in the dining area.
“Preservation has always been a big part of Thai cuisine,” the chef explains. “But it’s pretty much limited to staples like fish sauce, shrimp paste, and fermented fish. I want to explore what else can be done. I totally believe new products can move Thai cuisine forward.”
Jantraget’s most adventurous dishes—local oyster with algae and kaffir lime; smoked prawn crudo with ant eggs; free-range chicken with local mushrooms and maeng da (waterbug) butter—taste way better than they sound; they’re also among the most prettily plated dishes I’ve laid eyes on, presented across beautifully balanced fiveand seven-course tasting menus that can be matched with natural wines, craft beers, or fizzy fruit drinks fermented in-house.
Upon the restaurant’s reopening, the chefs hope to be using entirely local produce. “We’ve found better local suppliers for fresh seafood and beef, and our chocolate is produced in Chiang Mai,” Hoshino says with satisfaction. “We’re even making our own miso and vinegar now.”
CANVAS
Seated at the counter overlooking the calm open kitchen of Texan chef Riley Sanders’ compact Canvas—a restaurant in the trendy Thonglor area that serves cuisine inspired by Bangkok’s chaos, energy, and exuberance—I’m slowly digesting my nine-course tasting menu, but struggling to describe the chef’s unique cooking approach.
The presentation is contemporary, the techniques are European, yet the ingredients and flavors of the dishes before me are distinctly Thai: river prawns, pink peppercorns, and green mango; toasted rice bread, salted egg, and yellow chili; duck breast with santol fruit, peanut, and garlic; lemon basil, custard apple, and pomelo; pumpkin, pineapple, and pine sugar. For Sanders, after Bangkok, Thai produce is his inspiration.
The 29-year-old spent several years training under award-winning chefs in the United States before accepting a job as a private chef on a Miami-based yacht. His goal: a global culinary education. Sanders used his time off to eat his way through over 30 countries in
four years, using Michelin and the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list as his guides. Thailand’s capital became his favorite city.
“We’re a Bangkok restaurant and want to be reflective of this city: colorful, fun, interesting,” Sanders tells me. “I don’t consider us Asian or Western, and I don’t think fusion is the right genre either. We want to define what cooking in modern Bangkok can be by taking inspiration from the local sights, markets, and ingredients.”
Among the most vivid dishes on his tasting menus are confitstyle frog with hairy eggplant and holy basil–scented milk foam, and a delicate square of king mackerel prepared sous-vide in soya milk and topped with a rich green paste of dill and ant eggs. Frogs and mackerel are street-food staples, but they’ve never been treated with such precision, care, and creativity as they are here.
HAOMA
“Smell this!” exclaims Deepanker Khosla, crushing some dill that he’s just plucked from a planter box. “It’s wild!” I say, astonished at the concentration of flavor. The scent is heady with an intense taste of aniseed. Khosla then hands me a sprig of Thai wasabi, his eyes lighting up. “Try this!” It’s stronger than any horseradish I’ve had, immediately clearing my head.
I’m receiving the pre-dinner tour every diner gets at Haoma, a farm-to-table restaurant that, more than any of the other establishments I visit, stretches the definition of Thai food. Set in the 28-year-old Indian chef’s former home, it’s located at the end of a quiet lane in Phrom Phong’s residential backstreets, just a kilometer from the gridlock of busy Sukhumvit Road.
During our tour of Khosla’s tiny organic farm—flourishing thanks to an impressive aquaponics system that harvests and recycles water from the restaurant, directing it to the planter boxes, vertical hydroponics gardens, and miniature fish farm—we sniff and taste samples of many of the nearly 40 edible flowers, leaves, herbs, and vegetables grown here. We stop at the flapping fish Khosla breeds in high barrels, which I’ll taste soon enough. They’re scooped out at the start of service.
Harvesting produce as needed so that nothing goes to waste is integral to Khosla’s zero-waste, carbon-neutral, and plastic-free approach, which began with the restaurant renovation. Everything was repurposed, from timber recycled to an iron door grille from which