Yura An Cafe – Central World Plaza

Posted on 5 October 2009 by christao408

One of our largest malls is Central World Plaza. Formerly known as the World Trade Center (and renamed a few years after the September 11th attacks for obvious reasons), this mall underwent a doubling in size and renovation about three years ago. Something that Central World Plaza has an amazing number of is restaurants.

The entire top floor of the mall is nothing but restaurants, easily thirty sit-down restaurants situated shoulder to shoulder. A few weeks ago, Tawn and I decided to visit one we hadn’t tried before, Yura An Cafe, a nominally “modern” Japanese sushi restaurant.

The restaurant is bright and has a clean design. There is also an outdoor seating area that offers a broad view of the Rajaprarop – Rama I intersection.

There is a chalk board inside the restaurant playfully explaining the restaurant’s philosophy. “What is special about Japanese food?” “It’s very healthy & delicate and takes lots of skill.”

The Yura An roll, avocado and faux crab meat with fried tempura crumbs. Enjoyable crunch.

Japanese “bruschetta” with smoked salmon and cream cheese.

Fried soft shell crab spring rolls served over salad. Tasty, but a little too much mayonnaise dressing.

Stir fried pork with kim chi served over rice. Very tasty dish.

All in all, a very nice restaurant. Good service, nice ambience and tasty food. Not terribly authentic when it comes to Japanese food, but an interesting mixture of flavors from across Asia.

Bo.Lan Review

Posted on 26 September 2009 by christao408

Does the concept of a Michelin-starred Thai restaurant seem contradictory? Australian David Thompson is the head chef at Nahm, a London eatery that was the first Thai restaurant to receive such an award. A few months ago, two of his disciples, Duangporn “Bo” Songvisava and Dylan “Lan” Jones (pictured right), launched what they hope will be “a world class Thai restaurant” here in the Big Mango.

Tucked away in a small trok off Sukhumvit Soi 26, the somewhat eponymous Bo.Lan strives to stake out a place in the local culinary scene that I’m not sure really exists: a serious Thai restaurant where the emphasis is on the food in a deeply intellectual way.

Why am I uncertain that this desired place even exists? Krungthep does not lack for “fine dining” Thai restaurants. The nicer hotels all have them (Erawan Tea Room at the Grand Hyatt is quite decent) and there are stand-alones such as Baan Khanitha that are popular destinations when guests are in town.

But despite the attentive service and pretty decor, my perception is that, at its most basic, the food in these places is really no better than what I could get from the nighttime food vendors on Sukhumvit Soi 38. Some of these restaurants do focus on “palace cuisine” – fussier dishes that aren’t the mainstay of either typical Thai home cooking or street vendor’s woks – but the chefs at these fine dining restaurants still seem to be going through the paces, not really thinking about the food they are creating.

If this desire to create an intellectual Thai dining experience sounds like a tall order, that’s because it is. Thais love eating but, if this makes any sense, Thais don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the food they eat. They don’t appreciate the origins or the presentation of their food as much as they are concerned that it is tasty.

In the few months that it has been open, Bo.Lan has garnered lots of attention and is the place for well-heeled Thais to show their faces. One criticism I heard floating around was that the food was “too basic”. For this kind of money, it seemed that diners were expecting either the fussy palace cuisine or fusion food, in which western ingredients are placed into a shotgun marriage with Thai flavors, a recipe for disaster if ever there was one.

Tawn and I decided we should reject all the things we’ve heard and go try BoLan. We enjoy thoughtful dining and wanted to think for ourselves about what Khun Duangporn and Khun Dylan were doing in their kitchen. The perfect occasion presented itself on Tawn’s birthday a few weeks ago.

The restaurant itself is located in what looks like a modified former house. The ceilings are low and covered with traditional rice sorting baskets to help muffle the noise. The ambiance is dark but the volume from the background music (and incongruous mix of bland “world” music that include covers of 1980’s pop hits done in a bossa nova style) was a bit overwhelming. I arrived several minutes ahead of Tawn and it took some effort to get someone to take my drink order. When the bottle of wine I ordered arrived, it was incorrect and there was some confusion until another server explained that they were out of the the wine I had ordered.

In order to get the best sense for the chefs’ skills, we went with the “Bo.Lan Balance” tasting menu which has, depending on how you count, about six courses but maybe as many as ten, depending. Because of the darkness, picture quality is low and I didn’t shoot pictures of all of the dishes as once they started arriving, our table was quickly overflowing with plates and bowls.

After ordering and before receiving the amuse bouche, a pre-dinner drink and snack was brought as part of the tasting menu. “Ya Dong Phaya Sue” is a tequila-like liquor, essentially a type of upcountry moonshine. It was paired with an unsweetened pandan leaf juice shooter. When Thais drink, they like to snack on something salty, sour and spicy. A clever play on this were the slivers of green mango, another very bitter fruit called “ma dan” and a nut called “luuk yii”. These were dipped in the sea salt and chili flakes garnishing the plate.

The process was like this: sip of liquor, sip of juice, bite of sour-salty-spicy snack, repeat.

This was an interesting way to begin because it really was a deconstruction of the core flavors of Thai cuisine. It wasn’t a modernization or substitution, really. No messy fusion here. It was just taking each of the parts and laying them out individually. It was fun and adventurous.

The amuse bouche arrived, five little bites to be eaten from left to right. The first was a slice of starfruit with tamarind and chili paste. Then a southern style rice salad called khao yam with rice, pomelo, kaffir lime skin, and toasted coconut with a fermented shrimp dressing called nam buu duu. Then a rice cracker with another type of salad on top. Then a slice of grilled pork neck with coriander leaf and toasted, ground rice. Then a small seared rice flour pancake – pang ji plaeng – topped with shrimp and fried garlic.

Again, the core flavors of Thai cuisine were each represented but as you progressed through the plate, the emphasis changed. The first bite was very sour with a bit of spice. The second was very salty/fermented. The third was spicy. The fourth was salty. The final one was a little sweet. Especially interesting was the second dish, the southern style salad. The sauce is very complex and it is a rarity in Thai restaurants. Tawn recalls his grandmother especially enjoying it.

The next five dishes arrived all at once, served in typical Thai family style. This was a lot of food and while they covered all their bases – one salad, one soup, one curry, one stir-fry, etc – it gave us too much food for two people.

The first dish, pictured above, was preserved duck egg simmered in fresh coconut cream with lemongrass, white turmeric and chili, served with pickled turnip omelets and fresh vegetables. It was very tasty and had clean, pronounced flavors.

There was also a salad of grilled river prawn with lemongrass, mint, coriander and chili jam dressing. The dressing was a bit heavy. The river prawn was very fresh, though, and the spice of the dressing did cut through the richness of the prawn meat very effectively.

Other dishes we received included a deep fried “blue fish” marinated in turmeric, garlic and shallots served with a southern style lime and chili dipping sauce. The fish was a small portion and was very bony. While the taste was good, the skin was rubbery instead of crispy, an unpleasing texture. Between the fish and the prawn, I think we would have been fine with just the prawn.

We also received a gaeng khiaw wan nuea kem – green curry of salted beef ribs. Tawn isn’t a beef eater but did try this curry. At first, it tasted a bit… not rich, because unlike most versions of this curry, it wasn’t finished with a lot of coconut cream. But the more I tasted it, the more it grew on me. It was like having a consomme, the beef broth’s flavors remaining very distinct, but with the added layers of flavor and complexity of the homemade curry paste. The salted beef ribs added a nice note to the dish and for the first time in my life, I fully appreciated why the little baby eggplant are in this dish. Their crunchy sourness paired very nicely with the saltiness of the beef and the fragrant aroma of the curry.

Each of us ordered a small soup. Tawn had gaeng juut, a so-called “bland” soup with baby squid stuffed with pork in a clear broth. In this case, the broth was very herbal and a little sweet and it wasn’t anywhere near bland. I ordered a spicy pork soup that had large, leafy vegetables that were tangy. It was flavorful but at this point I was getting so full that it stopped being enjoyable.

The meal was served with jasmine rice or “gaba” rice, a darker whole grain rice. In a rather stingy measure, despite having spent 1500 baht (US$ 44) per person on the set meal, they ding you an extra 30 baht if you order the gaba rice.

The main dishes were well prepared but some of the “intellectualism” of the amuse bouche and pre-dinner drink were missing. Certainly, the quality of ingredients and attention to detail during preparation were very high. The preserved duck egg and the green curry were the best of the dishes. The work that went into making the curries from scratch really paid off as the flavor profiles were very distinct. In fact, two weeks after eating them, I can still recall their taste memories.

The prawn and fish dishes were both a little flat. They weren’t bad, but they also weren’t spectacular. The soups were lost in the shuffle. Too many flavors competing for attention on the table and, because of that, I think the menu could use some paring down.

Service throughout the meal was inconsistent. They tried to educate us about what we were eating, explaining the dishes before us. Tawn’s observation, which I agree with, is that they didn’t seem to really comprehend what they were telling us, instead repeating the instructions they had been told to give. It was difficult to believe that these servers are really passionate about the food they are serving. As Tawn put it (as I write this) they probably eat the local vendor’s som tam – green papaya salad – with one single note (spicy!) when they’re on their meal break.

Oddly, in a country where desserts aren’t a major part of the dining experience, there were three separate dessert courses as part of the set.

The first was another deconstruction of a popular dish: tabtim grob – dyed “ruby” water chestnuts that are coated with flour then fried, coconut agar agar and jackfruit served over crushed ice with syrup. This was refreshing and the presentation was fun. Had it been left at this, dessert would have been a satisfying end to the meal.

The “dessert du jour” (different for both of us) started to venture into the overwhelming. There was a plantain that had been grilled in its peel and then drizzled with a perfumed sauce, a play on the grilled plantains that are a popular street vendor snack. This one was starchy in an unappetizing way and a single bite was more than enough. The jar contained saku – tapioca pearls with coconut cream. This is a favorite of mine, but there was nothing about the preparation that was outstanding. The saku I buy at Villa market is every bit as tasty, and I became preoccupied by the fact that the mouth of the jar was barely wide enough for my spoon. Finally, not fully visible in the glass, is a popsicle frozen on a chopstick. I think this was meant to be tamarind flavor, but after one bite I found myself not very interested in it, either.

Tawn’s dessert was gluay kai chuam grayasat – this is an intellectual play on a Thai snack, small sweet bananas that are eaten very ripe with rice crackers. Here, they took the bananas and boiled them in a sugar syrup. The rice crackers were a homemade meusli-like mix of fried rice, nuts and toasted coconut drizzled with palm sugar. This was tasty and kind of fun. In the bowl was graton loy gaew – a tropical fruit that is sour and tough on the outside but cottony and sweet on the inside. The fruit was also soaked in syrup and then served over ice. The elements of the dessert really played off the “balance” theme of the set menu: crunchy and soft, sour and sweet, tough and cottony.

While they may believe that nothing succeeds like excess, the petit fours accompanying our post-dinner tea were too much. They were a scattering of Thai dry desserts, some fruit, and khanom goh – a type of meringue. By this point we were so satiated that we hardly touched the petit fours, calling instead for the check.

Conclusions. For 1500 baht per person, we received a very generous amount (too much, really) of well-prepared, very high-quality food. I would like to go back and order a la carte, trying some other dishes and maybe choosing a bit less food for my meal. There is no doubt that the chefs are giving their creations a lot more thought than most Bangkok chefs, Thai or otherwise, are. That’s refreshing and, most of all, interesting.

The challenges Bo and Lan face are twofold: the first has to do with their staff. If you want to cultivate customers who are passionate about food, you have to have a staff that shares and can spread that passion. I did not feel it. The second is that they have a long uphill slog to find diners who are true foodies. I’m not convinced that breed of diner is very plentiful here. As a chef of the short-lived but very enjoyable Paradox restaurant on Ekkamai explained, Thais who have the means to travel overseas mostly like to stick with group tours and Thai or Chinese food. Expats who have the means to eat well in Bangkok are on expense accounts and go for imported steak, Japanese food, or Italian.

As a foodie, I hope they are successful. Something I noticed on their website is a page that is supposed to link to the Bangkok chapter of Slow Food International. Tellingly, the link doesn’t work. That may say more than anything else about what Bo.Lan’s chances are.

Chef Shiro’s Orris

Posted on 27 July 2009 by christao408

Saturday evening in Los Angeles, I met up with Curry, his brother Eric and William for dinner at Hideo “Shiro” Yamashiro’s Orris, a five-year old “small plates” restaurant that borrows heavily from the Japanese izakaya, or eating pub, tradition. A fusion of Japanese and French cuisines, Shiro’s emphasis is on the ingredients with unfussy presentations that highlight the clean flavors of the food.

It was a table full of foodies and we met several of the qualifications of the list of ten things you should know about food bloggers, so much so that an older diner who had been sitting inside the plate glass window and had noticed our photographing, stopped by as he left the restaurant to enquire about it.

William and Curry snap away. What you don’t see is Eric, to my left, taking pictures with his iPhone.

Let’s take a look at the small plates that we enjoyed over our leisurely two hour dining experience:

An amuse-bouche of ratatouille with fresh eggplants, tomatoes and capers. Lovely, bright flavors like summer piled on top of a slice of baguette.

An off-the-menu special, freshly smoked salmon on top of potato pancakes served with creme fraiche and tobiko – flying fish roe. This was also very nice and I’m tempted to try this one at home.

Dungeness crab salad “nests” – Freshly handpicked dungeness crab served on top of julienned cucumber in a light ginger dressing. This was tasty although other than a few slices of ginger, I couldn’t identify any “dressing” – something the cucumber could have benefitted from.

Squash blossoms stuffed with shrimp mousse and pistachios, lightly friend tempura-style and topped with a calmatta olive salsa. Very nice. These zucchini were beautifully tender and the salsa gave it the right zestiness.

Another off-the-menu special: halibut tempura on a tomato tarragon puree with garlic aioli. The halibut was very light, not at all oily, but also with such a delicate flavor that it got lost in the puree.

Tender Berkshire pork loin medallions sauteed in a zesty green peppercorn sauce. The pork was exceptionally tender and the sauce was very rich. This was a satisfyingly meaty dish.

We concluded with slices of roasted beets topped with Etorki Basque sheep cheese and finished with a drizzle of balsamic vinegar and olive oil with a sprig of dill. Shown in detail below.

The presentation (which I ruined by putting a slice of beet on top) was clever and visually pleasing. The flavor was perfectly balanced: the beets were sweet and earthy, which complemented the earthy richness of the cheese, which was cut by the balsamic vinegar. The dill provided an aromatic contrast that was very nice. This was my favorite dish.

The restaurant was a good value, with the bill not breaking $100 for four diners even with two of us enjoying glasses of wine. The food is creative, superbly high quality and intellectually engaging. Worth a return visit.

Chris, William, Curry and Eric in front of Orris.

The one drawback of the restaurant was the limited and not very inspiring dessert menu. Since it was still early and a pleasant summer evening, we decided to stroll down Sawtelle Boulevard to the local Pinkberry.

The Sawtelle district, which was an independent city until its residents voted to merge with Los Angeles in 1922, has an extensive Japantown, a suburban neighbor known informally as “Little Osaka”, as compared to Little Tokyo, which centers on Second and San Pedro Streets in downtown Los Angeles.

Among the many shops on this street are two branches of Giant Robot, the Asian American pop culture store (and magazine) that also has locations in SF and NY. In addition to GR there are plenty of nurseries, karaoke parlors and frozen yogurt shops.

We went to Pinkberry, an upscale frozen yogurt chain owned by Korean Americans that is a copycat of South Korean chain Red Mango, which has recently made inroads into the US market itself. While I had heard much about the Pinkberry mania, I had never tried it myself.

The deal is similar to the frozen yogurt shops of the 1980s but perhaps a little higher quality. The yogurt actually is tart, like yogurt really is, and the choice of toppings is slightly more eclectic.

Original flavor with lychee, mango and almonds – Eric’s choice.

Original with mango and blueberry – William’s antioxidant-rich choice.

Original with mochi and fresh Bing cherries – my choice. Curry opted for a granola parfait that did not photograph well.

As luck would have it, the West LA Buddhist Temple was sponsoring the annual Obon festival, a sort of “day of the dead” ceremony that is full of dancing and celebrating. Large processions of dancers, many glad in kimonos, parade around the streets to traditional music.

As the pleasant ocean breeze blew in from the Pacific, we enjoyed watching the crowds and taking in the sights.

Before calling it an evening, I heard someone calling my name. At first, I ignored it, since my name is common and the only people who would know me were standing right next to me. But when it was called again, I turned around to see a young lady whom I did not recognize.

Instead of pretending to know and hoping she would say something that would trigger my memory, I acknowledged that I didn’t know her name. Wouldn’t you know, it was another Xangan! What are the chances of that? “I thought you had left LA already,” she said.

Actually, this is the second time someone has randomly recognized me on the street because of my blog. The first time was about three years ago in the elevator at my previous apartment in Bangkok.

With the recognition of how small the world really is, we called it a night. I let the boys head home and returned to Bill and Alex’s to do my packing.

Ten Things You Should Know About Food Bloggers

Posted on 19 July 2009 by christao408

Sometimes you read a blog entry and you think, “Yes, this person hit the nail on the head!” (If you are Matt, you might think, “Drat, I was going to write that and they beat me too it.” But that’s another story.) This morning, a friend of the younger sister of a high school friend whose food blog I read posted a link to another food blog by Not Quite Nigella in which she lists 10 things you should know about food bloggers.

Here’s a sample:

#1 – Be prepared to eat early. Like a reverse Vampire, we love the light as more light means better photos. Eating dinner at 4pm? Sure, no problem, the light will be good then. Similarly, you’ll also find us seated near the window more often than not as the light is better there and we only use flash in extreme circumstances or in closed blogger-friendly company.

For the rest of the list, her entry is here. After reading this, you’ll either understand my dining behavior better or… just maybe… you’ll recognize some signs of your own inner food blogger. Enjoy!

Torched Saba at Musha with Curry

Posted on 12 August 2008 by christao408

Friday was a day of reunions and a lot of good eating. Sounds like the same story as every entry when I’m on vacation, doesn’t it?

First there was a lunch at the Shoreline Cafe in Long Beach with Aaron and Jose, former colleagues from my days working at AMC Theatres. Aaron had just moved to Los Angeles two days earlier, after living abroad with his partner in Mexico City for the previous two years. Having followed similar paths, we have had a lot to talk about and I’m glad we have stayed in touch. Hopefully now that he is in LA, he’ll find the next path that he needs to follow.

Jose is someone I haven’t had any contact with in years, and he was able to give me the low down on the universe of former AMC colleagues (a few of whom actually still work for AMC!). My days working in the motion picture exhibition industry were formative. One of these days I’ll write more about it, to try and capture just how much fun and how difficult running a movie theatre is.

After lunch, I continued my way to the west side of LA, making a stop at the pocket park next LAX. Located across the street from an In-n-Out Burger, this park is directly under the short final approach path for runway 25R. This is where many of the large planes coming from Europe, Asia and Australia land. Great spot for plane watching. Notice that I’m restraining myself and not posting any more airplane pictures.

About 3:00, a little Xangan pow-wow began as I met Gary at Cafe Surfas in Culver City, above. Surfas is this combination of a cute cafe and a store that sells restaurant supplies and gourmet foodstuffs. Credit goes to Tony for including this in one of his photoblogs and giving me the idea. Oddly, I got into trouble for taking pictures, so I guess Tony was just more clandestine than I, as he was able to get many beautiful shots.

Below, Gary is shocked by the high price of imported Thai coconut milk. What goes for fifty cents in Thailand (or the equivalent in baht) is three dollars at Surfas! This must be designed for Angelenos who aren’t comfortable walking into a local “ethnic” market, where you could get many of these ingredients at a much lower price.

On the kitchen supply side of the store I found my dream oven: an industrial sized convection oven in which I could cook a few hundred cupcakes at once. This is where a passing employee admonished us to not take pictures. I would have been more favorable in my comments above, noting the broad selection of foreign foods rather than their significant prices, had they not been so camera shy.

We were joined by Steve. Because he doesn’t regularly include any photos of himself on his blog, I made the decision not to include any photos of him in this entry. But he’s coming to Thailand soon so maybe you can encourage him to jump in front of the lens.

After browsing as Surfas, which really does have a great selection of things, especially cookware, we headed to the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. This is one of my old stomping grounds. When I lived in Los Angeles in 1995-96, I worked in Century City and spent a lot of time in Santa Monica with friends. Glad to see some things have not changed despite the continual “mallification” of the Promenade. Below, a group of hare krishna perform at the corner of Arizona and Third Street.

How do you know when you’ve really arrived in LA? When, in the course of two blocks, you hear hare krishna chanting at dusk, watch a group of youngsters break dancing for tips, get bored with a French mime doing slow motion sleight of hand, observe a man with his monkey, and are a bit shocked by a pair of books on display in the Barnes and Noble window: The Big Book of Breasts and The Big Penis Book. It is always 74 and sunny here, right?

For dinner, we were joined by William and tried Gary’s recommendation of Musha on Wilshire Boulevard, a Tokyo cuisine restaurant that also has a location in Torrance. Musha is often described as a Japanese-French fusion tapas restaurant. I’m not sure how accurate that description is. It might be better to describe it as an izakaya restaurant, kind of a sake bar that offers more significant food than your regular sake bar.

In the same way that Spanish tapas evolved from small bites provided to bar patrons to keep them from getting too drunk, izakaya serve small plates of food to satisfy customers over several hours of drinking.

Musha has received positive reviews for some of the spins it places on traditional izakaya dishes, as well as some downright non-Japanese food on the menu. We skipped the heavy drinking part (other than a beer that William and I split) and focused on the food.

The interior of Musha is small, with a bar at the front and a dozen tables behind. Lanterns and warm colors keep the space intimate and cozy. Service is friendly and efficient, primarily by a pair of Japanese-speaking wait staff that keep things running smoothly. Other than a noisy group of office workers who gathered at the bar to celebrate something, the volume of the restaurant was tolerable.

Let’s take a look at our culinary tour. We started with a spicy tuna dip served with rice crackers, something fun and tasty:

Also arriving early was duck breast marinated in ponzu sauce (the citrus-flavored dipping sauce common with things like gyoza) served on grated daikon oroshi with Tokyo leeks. The duck was very tender and the ponzu sauce really cuts through the richness of the meat.

The highlight of the evening – the culinary highlight of my entire trip, in fact – was the torched aburi saba. This was mackerel sliced sashimi-style, marinated in vinegar, then torched at your table. Here’s a video:

The finished product was a perfect balance of textures and flavors. Saba is a meaty fish with a slightly salty disposition. It wasn’t marinated too long, so it still had the sashimi texture, but the saltiness was balanced by the sweet tanginess of the marinade. To top it off, the skin was slightly crisp and had a charred smokiness from the torching.

Such a delicate layering of flavors. I’d like to try making it at home, but don’t want to buy an industrial grade torch. That’s a bit too much. Maybe I can find a pipe-fitter who will lend me a torch. Below, a closeup of two individual pieces. Notice the color of the flesh.

Next we had a grilled portobella mushroom and acorn squash with a miso-citrus dipping sauce. A charcoal brazier was placed on the table and we were able to cook our own mushroom.

I wasn’t the only person taking photos. William provides many of the excellent photos that appear on Gary’s blog. I’ve been thinking about this idea – I should have a crew with me when I’m out. Someone to take pictures, someone to take notes, while I just savor the experiences and write about them later. Applications now being accepted!

About this time, Steve had to take off for business. Sadly, he missed out on a number of great dishes that followed. Here are homemade tofu fries with a creamy wasabi sauce and a sweet chili sauce. I’m going to share a secret with you: I think the chili sauce is the same sweet chicken dipping sauce you can buy in large bottles at Asian supermarkets throughout the US. The tofu, being homemade, was very fresh and the concept of tofu fries is very fun.

We took a distinctly non-Japanese beat with the arrival of a risotto, typical ham and cheese but served from a hollowed out round of Parmesan cheese. Sadly, they didn’t leave the round at the table, but instead served the risotto and took it back to the kitchen.

The risotto was probably the low point of the savory meal. It was tasty, maybe a bit gloppy, but it was just risotto. I didn’t see how it fit into the larger theme of the menu.

Our final savory dish was the takotama. This is a two-layer omelet with chopped octopus, leeks, red ginger and bonito broth. It was very geometrically laid out, so I needed pictures from both sides.

The takotama was tasty, although a little sweet. By this point we were getting quite full and decided to share a dessert. Japanese restaurants aren’t known for their desserts. Traditionally, if you want something sweet you’ll head over to a bakery or sweet shop after dinner. This might explain why the dessert menu was lifted straight from any western restaurant: tarte tartin, creme brulee, molten chocolate cake, etc.

We opted for the molten chocolate cake, which was served on an ice-cold plate. Good for keeping the ice cream frozen but the cake didn’t feel like it had seen the inside of an oven anytime recently. In fact, given the soft exterior, I think it was zapped in the microwave. Not long enough, though, as the interior wasn’t molten by any stretch of the imagination. Molasses moves faster in a Minnesota winter!

The chocolate cake aside – really, what was I expecting of a chocolate cake ordered at a Japanese restaurant? – the meal was really tasty and surprisingly inexpensive. Would you believe that the total bill for all of the above plus a large bottle of Japanese beer, was under $80 before gratuity? A very good value.

Of course, more than anything else, the company was wonderful. Sorry that Steve wasn’t there to see the meal to its conclusion. I did enjoy visiting with Gary and William and look forward to our next culinary adventure together.

Paradox Soft Opening, Partie Deux

Posted on 27 January 2008 by christao408

Fine dining, western-style, is still in its infancy here in Khrungthep. We have fine dining, alright: som tam, khao chae, tom yum goong, and a host of curries that work miracles on your taste buds. But western style dining faces a number of traps – ranging from fickle and inexperienced diners who are wary of venturing into unfamiliar culinary ground, to astronomical food costs for fundamental western ingredients that are not available locally, to a service mentality that runs counter to delivering each diner’s dishes at the same time – that can befuddle would-be restauranteurs.

It is against this backdrop that new restaurants open and, sometimes, succeed. Paradox, owner Adam Bryan-Brown’s new high concept dining, shopping, and art exhibition space, has opened its doors (partially) to see how it will be received by, and how it can shape, Khrungthep’s high-end diners.

Right: Tawn enjoys a promotional Belvedere vodka cosmopolitan with a lengthy twist.

In the interest of full disclosure, the meals I had at Paradox on Friday and Saturday were part of a promotion where the four-course set menu (priced at 1250 baht) was offered free to the first twenty reservations each day. Additional items and gratuities were paid for ourselves. In talking about the food and restaurant, I’m approaching it from a “What if we had paid for the entire meal ourselves?” perspective.

The front half of Paradox’s multi-space building remains under construction, above. This space, which is scheduled to be a retail store and possibly a wine and jazz bar in the evenings, will do a lot to determine how visible and welcoming Paradox is to passers by on Soi Ekkamai. In a neighborhood filled with nightclubs and restaurants, having a good face will be important. As construction continues, Paradox is barely visible, hidden down a driveway near the corner of Soi Ekkamai 17 and fronted by a sidewalk noodle vendor.

It is worth a walk down that driveway, though, as the interior is modern and comfortable. A future open-air terrace dining area, a second floor private dining room and a quieter dining area behind the kitchen make the restaurant seem smaller than it really is. There is a large gallery/multi-use space that would lend itself well to many sorts of arts events. Currently, there is an exhibition of vibrant oil paintings by Vichian Boonmeemak in this space, which calls diners to leave their tables and browse the artwork between courses.

Chef Andrew Cole is at the helm of a large and capable kitchen team, turning out food that Tawn interestingly described as “comfort food”. Interesting, because while I wouldn’t use that word myself (I picture macaroni and cheese when I hear the words “comfort food”), I understand what he’s getting at. Cole’s Mediterranean inspired cuisine avoids pretentiousness by preparing fairly conventional ingredients – roast chicken, for example, or spaghetti with scallops – in creative yet grounded ways. There is no over-reaching with foo-foo additions like a dollop of medjool date paste, a pillow of lima bean foam, or cubes of bay leaf gelatine.

That’s important because all too often in fine dining, there seems to be the urge to turn fusion into confusion: searches for inspired and new flavor combinations turn out messy and misguided.

Let’s take a look at our dinner, which was the same both nights with the exception of the amuse bouche and a pasta dish on Saturday.

One thing that sets Paradox apart right away is their bread basket, above. Khrungthep is a city lacking in quality bread and the Paradox bread basket was a welcome start to the meal. The bread sticks are light and flaky things of beauty and the spinach bread we had on Friday (I think it was a spinach bread… maybe basil bread?) went very well with a tomato spread that accompanied it.

An amuse bouche of spinach au gratin atop toast was very tasty, below. A plate of a dozen of those along with the soup would have been enough to make a satisfying meal. Friday’s amuse bouche was a deep-fried half of a baby zucchini served with an olive tapenade and red sauce. Both were welcoming and familiar ways for the kitchen to greet the diners.

The set menu began with a Parma ham salad, above. What on the menu could be mistaken for a stodgy and unimaginative start was creatively – and tastily – inverted. Whereas you would normally expect melon-wrapped ham with a side of greens, the chef instead wrapped the beautiful greens with the ham and balanced the melon on the side. A couple of perfectly ripened tomatoes and the accompanying balsamic vinegar reduction nicely tied together the flavors while the plate’s arrangement was pleasantly architectural without being silly.

One hit of the menu was the cream of pumpkin soup, below. Pumpkin has such a wholesome, good-for-you flavor and when it is balanced with just the right amount of cream, it is such a delight to eat that I could subsist on this and nothing more – except for those spinach au gratin amuse bouches, which would go wonderfully with the soup. The texture of the soup was velvety and the garlic croutons lent a nice textural contrast with their crunchy-then-buttery-soft quality.

There were three main courses from which to choose and since both nights we had three diners, we chose all three and shared. The first was a roasted boned baby chicken with port wine sauce, above. This was a very nice take on a menu standard – roast chicken – and was successful because the chicken itself had such nice flavor. Beyond the sauce, beyond the crisp skin, this was one tasty chicken. The port sauce was a nice addition and the accompanying medley of vegetables were well-prepared. The chicken suffered from some toughness on Saturday night, but was none the less flavorful.

A vegetarian option, gilled polenta with sauteed mushrooms served with rocket salad, below, again took a classic combination and brought out the best of the flavors and textures through skillful preparation. The dish was piping hot and the polenta perfectly crisp on the outside and creamy on the inside Saturday evening, making it even more satisfying, although it would benefit from just a few drops of balsamic vinegar to complement the earthiness of the mushrooms.

The third main dish was a millefuille of river prawn served with saffron creme sauce, above. This was the most “artsy” of the dishes but was actually much simpler than it may sound. Resting on a bed of spinach – Tawn thought zucchini would have been a better choice, but I really liked the flavor of the spinach – the prawn was sliced and separated by a layer of puff pastry. The textural component of the pastry was an interesting touch; my dilly-dallying on Saturday, trying all the other mains before concluding with the prawn, did the texture no favors but the fault was entirely my own. The saffron creme sauce lends a nice richness and a subtle hint of floral spiciness to the fresh, clean flavor of the prawn meat.

On Saturday we ventured briefly onto the a la carte menu to try the spaghetti with scallops (imported from the US, which seems unnecessarily far) in a tomato and capsicum sauce, below. Tawn found this to be reminiscent of the satisfying foods of his childhood, the sweetness of the peppers in the sauce playing nicely with the sweetness of the scallops.

Dinner concluded with a very nice apple pie with vanilla ice cream, above. This has to be the most classic of “comfort” desserts (except for the tasty but overly frequent creme brulee that seems to be on the menu of every restaurant in creation) and it was so nicely done. Constructed as a tart, the pastry crust was flaky and tender, the apples cooked to just the right point of softness, and the accompanying honey-based sauce (colored by pandan leaf, is it?) was a beautiful addition, albeit a little too sweet on an already sweet dish. This proved to be a very satisfying finish to the dinner.

Throughout dinner both days, we received extremely polished and attentive service. Right now the dining room is not filled to capacity and hopefully the staff retains their polish in the heat of a busy night. But at this point the very good food is accompanied by the sort of service organization lacking in many of the fine dining restaurants in the Big Mango.

In speaking more with the chef, he sounds very interested in exploring the use of local ingredients as well as doing special menus featuring the cuisines of different regions around the Mediterranean. The second idea is one done well at several restaurants, and the upcoming focus weeks – “Vegetarian Delights” the week of February 18th and “The Food of Spain” the week of February 25th – will give Cole some room to play.

It is the first idea, though – the one about exploring more local ingredients – that may prove to be the biggest test of his skills and, perhaps, Khrungthep fine diners’ often limited adventurousness. With the host of great ingredients available on the land and in the seas around Thailand and Southeast Asia, it is a shame that more local diners are so insistent that their tomatoes are imported from France, their cheese from Italy, and their sea bass from Chile. I’m very excited about the idea of more dabbling with locally-sourced ingredients as I tire of paying high prices just to subsidize the long air and sea journeys of my ingredients.

As for Friday and Saturday nights’ dinners, Paradox looks to have the sort of foundations that make for a truly successful restaurant: good space, good location, and – most importantly – good food and service. The chef’s kitchen is turning out thoughtful and well-prepared versions of standard dishes – a good way to get started. He shows enough creativity and imagination to play with some of the assumptions diners might make and, in so doing, may have the opportunity to explore some really interesting culinary ground.

There are still many questions to be answered about how the menu develops, how the space is used once construction is finished, and whether the quality can be consistently maintained over time. But from these first few visits, I have no doubt that Tawn and I will make Paradox a destination when we want to celebrate birthdays, promotions, and other special occasions.

The Morning of My Departure for Bangkok

Posted on 30 October 2005 by christao408

Daylight Saving Time has ended – yeah, an extra hour this morning before departing to the airport. Holly and I are sitting around her living room watching New York 1 for local news, drinking coffee, and I’m thinking about walking down to the corner bagel shop for one last taste of New York. Thai Airways webite is showing an on-time departure (hours and hours before departure) for my flight.

Saturday night it was a pleasure hanging out with Keith and Aaron for about ninety minutes. Keith had his “Boyfriend-aholic” t-shirt on, which seems appropriate. Had a good conversation with Aaron about a little puppy that has been following him around!

I walked down Seventh Avenue to Blue Hill and thankfully allowed myself enough extra time because I overshot the restaurant by six blocks. It is in that section known as Greenwhich Village – the point where the grid of streets ends – that I got confused. Holly was just starting on a glass of Pinot Noir at the bar when I arrived, spot-on at 9:00. We had a fantastic dinner, that only could have been improved with the presence of Tawn and you, of course!

Holly and I chose the tasting menu, paired with a wine tasting menu. It was fantastic:

Amuse bouche

Celeraic soup
Butternut squash sorbet

First plates

Grilled wild striped bass with salsify puree and tomota-pepper vinaigrette
Wine: Lieb Family Cellars Rose, North Fork Long Island (New York) 2004
Chatham Cod with razor clamgs, lobster, crab and sucrine lettuces
Wine: Channing Daughter’s Vino Bianco, South Fork Long Island (New York) 2004

Main plate

Loin of Vermont baby lamp with wild mushrooms, chestnuts, banana squash, Stone Barns brussel sprout leaves
Wine: Joseph Phelps Le Mistral, Monterey County (California) 2002

Desserts

Buttermilk Panna Cotta with plum marmalade and plum sorbet
Cheesecake with bitter chocolate sauce
Wine: “MR” Mountain Wine, Malaga (Spain) 2004

Last taste

Miniature chocolate muffin top

The celeraic soup, served in a tall, thin shot glass, was very tasty and quite hot. It had a infused foam on top that was really a nice textural contrast to the rich soup. The butternut squash sorbet, served on a demitasse spoon, was richly flavored and subtly sweet. Very interesting and buttery but the flavors are better as a soup.

The bass and the rose wine were the best pairing. The bass had a seared crust with a tomato-pepper vinaigrette that absolutely melted in your mouth. The rose, which was enjoable on its own, just jmped to life following the bass and the flavors continued to evolve for the next several moments.

The cod was very lightly cooked, tender and flaky. The broth was a high point full of great crustacean flavors that I sopped up with one of the fresh soft breadsticks.

The lamb, an unusual choice to serve a generous portion of loin, was lightly breaded on one side, tremendously tender and flavorful, and also a bit too salty. The banana squash slice was delectable and wild mushrooms and chestnuts captured the season beautifully.

Of the desserts, we suggested to the server afterwards that the order should have been reversed. The cheescake was served in individual small preserve jars and had a small dallop of bitter chocolate on top. The cake increased in richness the deeper you dug and the chocolate had an interesting counter-note of saltiness. It was very enjoyable, but had been completely overshadowed by the amazing buttermile panna cotta. Like a fresh yogurt, the tangy creamy base had a layer of plum marmalade that was bursting with ripe fruitiness. A wedge of plum sorbet added a coolness to the whole thing.

It was an absolutely fantastic meal and I can’t wait to return to Blue Hill again.

christao408

The adventures of an expat American who moved to Bangkok for his husband.

Tag Archives: Dining