Sampling the best of Bangkok's cuisine

With its mix of street food stalls and Michelin-starred restaurants, no city, except perhaps Mexico City, offers the range of food Bangkok does

- Rahul Jacob

(from left) Bangkok's Chinatown offers a wide range of food cuisines; at the Opium Bar; and (below) Gelee by Suhring.

With its mix of countless street food stalls that mushroom in the evenings with fold-up tables and stools and high-end Michelin starred restaurants, there is no other city, except for Mexico City perhaps, that offers the range of eating options that Bangkok does.

Plenty of cultish hype abounds as well. There’s a restaurant with a billboard of a chef who has appeared on a Netflix series, another with a bar menu with mostly baffling headings such as acid and expression gins. When I saw a to-let sign for a shophouse, which declared it would make the ideal “Portuguese-styled shophouse bar”, it seemed to mark a peak of the Bangkok shophouse trend.

At the acclaimed Opium Bar, for instance, one climbs up several flights of stairs in a converted pharmacy and medicine shop of the owner's family to a rooftop with panoramic views of Chinatown. The cocktails menu, titled “Liquid Surreality”, is akin to a botanical encyclopaedia. The cocktail Eyes Wide Shut offers “mezcal washed with vegan cheese, smoked pine cordial, chili kimchi and paprika tonic”. I drank a Dawn or Dusk, a mix of Roku gin, oolong liqueur, nitro yerba mate tea and “maybe Japanese mint”. The cocktail comes with the disclosure that “it was impossible to capture the atmosphere in the farm in one drink because the early morning gives a very different vibe to when the sun is setting.” Inevitably, the challenge of meditating on sunrise and sunset before deciding on your cocktail, we spent a lot of time asking in-house expert Celina Kuninaka for advice. The vivacious Singaporean also gave us excellent suggestions for dinner in Chinatown.