Friday night, Roka, Bill and I had dinner at the soft opening of a new restaurant, art gallery, and performance space called “Paradox” on Soi Ekkamai.  Website here.  It is a fancy new high-concept place featuring Mediterranean food.  Since they are not quite finished with construction of the whole complex, they’re doing this soft opening to ease their staff into operations and to get the word out.

They offered a not-much-advertised promotion featuring free four course set dinners for four, for the first twenty reservations each day.  The promotion ends today.  Roka read about it in a blog and called me, so we made reservations for Friday evening.

It was really good, but I didn’t bring my camera.  Course after course, I cursed my camaralessness.  After dinner the Australian chef, Andrew Cole, came by the table and we talked for about twenty minutes.  We critiqued the food (mostly compliments with only a few bits of feedback), learned how he found his way here (because of Pakistan’s political troubles he discontinued a cross-continent journey and ended up here), talked about the challenges of fine dining in Bangkok (expectations of the well-heeled locals are largely based on what everyone else is doing, not on what is new, original, or even good), and his vision for the restaurant.  The picture here is from their website, but it shows the general idea behind the food.

As there were only three or four tables being served while we were there, we inquired as to whether they had any places left on Saturday night.  Why not come back and enjoy another free meal and get some pictures for the blog?  Sadly, they were at 22 reservations so they were past the free dinner stage.  We decided we’d wait until another day, but then at the BTS station, Roka received a phone call.  It was the manager.  Andrew had spoken with him and would we care to come back for another meal on the house?

Absolutely!

So stay tuned for some pictures and more detailed coverage of this new restaurant in my next entry…