WIMINTRA JANGNIN & STUART JAY RAJ
The one-stop place for all things a hotelier needs to know is hotelintel.co. Like any good hotelier knows, this includes having a good knowledge of everything food & beverage, from where to buy the freshest produce to knowing chefs. We caught up with hotelintel. co’s founder, Wimintra Jangnin, and her partner Stuart Jay Raj to ask them a few Valentine/ foodie-related questions.
How did you guys meet? Through common friends.
Which restaurant(s) do you frequent? We eat at Oskar a lot on Sukhumvit 11. By a lot, we mean averaging four times a week! If not Oskar, we go to Bamboo for Middle Eastern food on Sukhumvit 3, or when we really need to get a good quality fast Thai meal, is it too uncool to say that we are regulars at the ‘Eat Thai’ basement food court at Central Embassy? The only authentic Sichuan food and the best Chinese food, in our opinion, in Bangkok is Chuan Wei Fang on Narathiwat 24. We also go to Indus regularly for their weekend unlimited a-la-carte brunch, Great Shanghai for Peking Duck, Cocotte for steak and Lenzi for Italian. We are fortunate that one of us speaks a lot of languages so when we travel we get to eat local, authentic food and not those touristy ones. At Chuan Wei Fang, all the staff are Chinese speaking — it seems no one speaks Thai or English there. As long as you know what to order, it’s amazing.
What’s a ‘date night’ like in Bangkok? Every night is a date night for us. Anywhere that involved great black and blue steaks, great red wine, truffle cheese, and Iberico ham. The perfect date is the taste of flesh and blood swirling in our mouths with a really nice complementary red wine to pique the palate.
Is there a food that one of you likes but the other despises? I love liver. He can’t stand it, though he regularly buys me a tub of VIVIN Foie Gras when he wants to get in my good books. He loves anything with eggplant but I hate it.
Name a dish that you both fell in love with. Where did you have it? We have a few — in Hong Kong at our favourite Sichuan restaurants (Sichuan Paradise and Qi — House of Sichuan). A few in the US — pancakes at Sarabeth’s, and others in Bangkok at the places that we’ve already mentioned. Cocotte does the best black and blue cooked steak that we have tasted in Bangkok. Oh yeah, did I mention Iberico ham? I did? Okay, it’s worth another mention — Iberico ham.
Any recommendations on what to do or where to go this Valentine’s Day? Go where you can enjoy the food, go for what you really like and don’t think what your Instagram photos would look like. Most of our food photos are sh*t, but we get to really eat great food that we enjoy. We don’t care about how others think it looks.