Butler's--haute desserts in Bangkok

J and I went to Gaysorn for lunch today. I read about a new dessert-focused cafe called Butler's in BK magazine last week, and I've been bugging J to go with me ever since. The chef/ co-owner, Tim Butler, is a CIA grad who is a well-known pastry chef from several New York restaurants such as Aquavit, Alto and L'Imperio. I think what brought him to Bangkok must be his Thai fiancee, who graduated from the French Culinary Institute (how cool!) and was a sous chef at L'Imperio.

Butler's was very chic--a cafe on a platform that sits atop a fish pond, surrounded by flowers and green shrubs. The color scheme was dark chocolate and deep purple, which reminded me a bit of Le Notre cafes in Bangkok. I really like the staff uniform there: crisp long-sleeved shirt in light brown (like cafe au lait) and a dark chocolate colored necktie tucked into the middle of the shirt. Cute!

For drinks, J and I both ordered a refreshingly delicious Iced Tea Mojito--limeade with muddled mint leaves and brown sugar, topped with iced tea. It's so good that I think it deserves a big picture tribute here:

We loved the complimentary bread and butter at Butler's too. Crusty, warm French bread served with the best butter I've had in Bangkok. I said 'best' because of a really simple touch--adding a light layer of sea salt on top of the compounded butter. I love my butter salted, and this saved me the need to sprinkle salt on my buttered bread. A lazy girl's dream come true. =)

I wanted to save my stomach for dessert, so I ordered a very light lunch. A 'simple' salad to share (that's really the name of the salad), and pan-seared scallops with taro puree and frisee for main course. J had orecchiette pasta with sundried tomatoes, thyme and clams.

The salad was simple alright--mixed salad with cherry tomatoes and lightly dressed in reduced balsamic vinegar and olive oil. However, there were some unique elements to this salad. First, it had a generous amount of fried shallots, which I guess is an homage to Thai cuisine. Second, there were paper-thin slices of fried taro, so thin that they were almost translucent (see top-right picture above)! I loved these taro slices...very crispy, salty, and also packed a potent punch of black peppers.

The main courses were good, but not great. My scallops were nice and big, and perfectly cooked. They were caramelized on the outside yet still juicy and jiggly on the inside. All they lacked was a natural sweetness that I guess only comes with super fresh/ sashimi-grade scallops. As for J's dish, it was well-flavored, but the pasta was not al dente, and J complained that there was too much oil. I guess my health-conscious streak did rub off on him after all.

Then finally we had desserts. I was so looking forward to this, and when the plates arrived, I was not disappointed (at least presentation wise). We had two beautifully presented desserts: Poached pineapple with pandanus cream and sake granite, and chocolate ganache with chocolate ice cream, topped with orange segments and caramelized cashews.

The sake granite was to-die-for, and it went really well with the pineapple. However, the pandanus cream was just too rubbery. I expected it to be creamy or mousse-like, but it was almost as tough as marzipan. As for the chocolate dish, the ganache was kind of like a flourless chocolate cake, which went well with the cashews but not so much with the oranges. I couldn't really taste the orange flavor, and if they had wanted to accentuate 'orangeness' they should have added some orange zest into the chocolate ganache. The chocolate ice cream though, was fantastic. We could tell that it was made from high quality dark chocolate, and it was only a tad sweet. Yum!

I'm glad new eateries like this are opening up in Bangkok. It's a great place to hang out with friends for desserts in the afternoon after a tiresome round of shopping. Now if only something like the Brunch Club in Hong Kong could expand to Thailand.....

Butler's

Gaysorn Plaza Lobby Floor

Creole cravings

In my college days, my TV was constantly tuned to the Food Network. I loved the Barefoot Contessa and Everyday Italian the most, but oftentimes I'd find myself watching Emeril Live at around 6 pm while cooking dinner. His constant 'Bam!' was annoying, and I really wondered if he could cook all that well--he seemed more like an entertainer than a super chef.

Regardless, Emeril had embedded in me a curiosity for Creole/ Cajun cuisine. I must have heard him talk about gumbo, etouffee, andouille sausages, jambalayas, and blackened chicken for thousands of time! So despite having left the US for more than 2 years, I still remember these names and even know of the top off my head how to cook each of them.

I've only tried Creole/ Cajun cuisine twice I think...at Nola's in Palo Alto. Once with a good friend T, and again with fellow McK BAs from Stanford. I don't remember much about the food there, so I guess it wasn't spectacular, but Nola's got me hooked on corn bread--slightly sweet, gritty, and with sprinklings of sweet corn kernels. I've always had a weakness for corn; there was one point in my college years that I literally had bags and bags of Safeway frozen corn that I would just microwave up and eat while watching TV, sometimes eating nothing but the corn all day (and I wasn't even dieting =P).

Anyway, for some weird reason, I had a super strong craving for Cajun/ Creole food like corn bread, crab cakes and gumbo while at the hospital post-appendectomy. I also really missed chicken pot pie and meatloaf--the classic American comfort food that brought back memories of dorm life at Frosoco. But being continents away from the US, I didn't expect to find any of these dishes in Bangkok restaurants. So I browsed through recipes for chicken pot pie on Paula Deen's web site and emailed it to my lovely J, telling him that I'd love him a thousand times more if he made a pie and brought it to visit me during my 1 week house arrest. =)

Fortunately for J, I found a restaurant in the heart of Bangkok called Bourbon Street that specializes in Cajun/ Creole cuisine of Louisiana, as well as classic American favorites! It's been opened for 22 years by a Louisiana native. I heard that the restaurant was in a sketchy area (right behind a Cabaret club) but I had to satisfy my cravings, so J and I ventured to well, a pretty nasty area, just to get a taste of Louisiana cookin'...

The area was sketchy alright. It was lined with beer bars, lounges and massage parlors catered for tourists/ expats with rows after rows of scantily-clad women. But the food did not disappoint. We ordered crab cakes, meat loaf, shrimp gumbo, jambalaya, blackened chicken, corn bread and collard greens (I had a serious craving, evidently).

Super moist meatloaf with creamy mashed potatoes and stewed veggies. Lots of gravy!

Gumbo topped with rice--the dark color is from the roux, a caramelized mixture of flour, butter, celery, carrots, and onion (i.e. the trinity)

My favorite dishes were: meatloaf, gumbo, blackened chicken and collard greens. Sadly though, the corn bread here was kinda blah. I would have wanted it to be a bit sweeter and less dry.

Even though we were super full, we decided to order a dessert, and chose Grandma's warm pecan pie with vanilla ice cream. My inspiration for this choice: I had just watched an episode of Martha in which she was a judge at a local pie competition in upstate New York, and the winner came to demonstrate his pecan pie recipe in her show. Unfortunately, Bourbon Street's pie was only covered with pecans on top of the pie, instead of having it all over the filling like the one I saw on Martha (must be expensive to buy pecans here at imported price). Plus the crust was soggy, so I bet it wasn't blind-baked before the filling was poured in. Another turn off was the orange tone of the vanilla ice cream. Could it get any more artificial? Oh well...here's a pic anyway.

Would I go back to this place? Well, only if I have another bout of serious craving. While the food was quite good, J and I felt very out of place in the restaurant. We were surrounded by expats/ tourists, and almost all of them had Thai female escorts, if you know what I mean. It's the unfortunate and ugly side of the Thai tourism industry, which totally ruins the image of Thai women.

Bourbon Street Restaurant & Oyster Bar

Washington Square, Sukhumvit 22

Tel: 02-259-0328

Healthy AND Yummy in Thailand!

I love food, but I love healthy food more. Over the years, my increasing knowledge of health and nutrition has somehow made it easy for me to find the virtues of even the worst-looking healthy food that would make most people turn their noses away and say "yuck!" I could chomp on dry cereal without qualms because I appreciate the enormous amount of fiber I'm ingesting, as well as the exercise I'm getting for my jaw muscles. In short, I have a high tolerance for whatever-the-taste-is of healthy food.

Note: This tolerance does not apply to regular food. If it's going to be indulgent with lots of empty calories, it'd better be good!

Fortunately for me, I've found lots of healthy AND yummy food options in Bangkok. Despite the fact that this city lacks a Whole Foods Market (which in my opinion would increase my standard of living and level of happiness by a million times), Bangkok somehow manages to have little gems of restaurants that serve California standard of healthy food with Thai standard of intense flavors. What a great combination, isn't it?

I frequent 3 places mainly for healthy food. Unfortunately I don't have pictures from all 3 places, so I'll just put up what I have.

1) Glow at The Metropolitan Hotel

I've been to Glow quite often with my darling J (how many men would be willing to eat vegetarian/ healthy food with me?! I'm a lucky girl). This organic cafe is usually empty. Like really empty. I guess healthy food is still too much of a niche in Thailand.

While some dishes weren't so great, there were definitely a few that we loved from our first few visits. For example, their Caesar salad with rye croutons and tofu dressing was wonderful, and so was their 7-grain burger.

The last time that we visited Glow though, the chef has changed the menu. (I forgot her name, but she's Australian and she is in charge of all the restaurants in the Como resort chain. This means that she flies around to each resort every once in a while, creates a menu, then leaves for another location.) This menu, in my opinion, is better than the last. We enjoyed most of the dishes we ordered, instead of just 1 out of 4, and the presentation was really artistic. Here are some of the dishes we had and enjoyed:

7-grain burger on rye baguette topped with avocado-tomato salsa

Banana-date tart on cashew crunch base, cashew cream and topped with carob ice cream

Glow at the Metropolitan Hotel

27 South Sathorn Road

Tel: 02-625-3333

2) Brown Eyes and Soy!

J's friend recommended this little cozy restaurant to us. I've seen it around many times but I never knew what type of food was offered there, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it serves Japanese-Italian style organic food. The owner is Japanese, and the majority of the clientele is Japanese (housewives, to be exact). So there are popular/ homey Japanese dishes like omelette rice topped with demi glace or Japanese curry, as well as Japanese-Italian fusion dishes like Spaghetti with Mentaiko (spicy cod roe).

I think the food here is very flavorful, and even those who dislike healthy food would still like the taste of the dishes here. I also love the fact that this place uses soy instead of dairy products, since I'm allergic to milk casein. All drinks here are soy-based, as is my favorite spiced chai soy latte above. Even bread, cookies, and ice cream here are soy-based. And I promise you're not going to feel like you've missed out on dairy once you try one of their soy sundaes. This one below is to-die-for, and good for your health!

Sesame and soy soft serve sundae with Japanese beans topping

Brown Eyes and Soy!

Grand Euro Inn

249 Sukhumvit 31

3) Anotai Vegetarian Restaurant


This hole-in-a-wall is amazingly close to my office, so at least I have easy access to healthy food whenever I want to. It serves Thai as well as Italian/ Western dishes, many of which contain fresh produce from the owner's organic farm (which by the way has a super cute name in Thai that literally means "Cultivating Love Farm"). The Thai stir-fries often contain mock ham, which I really like. It's obviously artificially flavored and chemically colored gluten, but still I like the way it perks up the dish just like how bacon perks up a plain pot of collard greens.


Another thing I totally love about this place is its desserts. Not all of them--most are too sweet for my liking, but the ones that are done right are so good that I routinely crave them. Scones here are THE BEST in Bangkok. Bar none. They are so buttery that I can smell the butter from behind the counter where the scones are reheated. The texture is lightly crumbly on the outside, and so moist on the inside that you can see steam escaping when you break it open. Not cakey or dry like the ones in the Erawan Tea Room, the Oriental or the Sukothai. In fact, I think Anotai's scones are only beaten by Zingerman's scones, and that's really a huge achievement in my book because Zingerman's scones are so good that I ordered them all the way from Michigan.


Like I said, the owner has her own organic farm, so she uses organic duck eggs for her baked goods, and also likes to add unique flavorings such as organic rose petals, organic lavender, and organic butterfly pea petals to the scones. These yummies are then accompanied with a huge dollop of fresh cream and organic butterfly pea petal jam or a less unique but equally delicious strawberry jam.


My other must-try dessert here is the fig almond cake. It's so moist, dense, and complexly sweet with a touch of spice. I love the way ground almond adds not just flavor but a slightly chewy texture to the cake, which gives it so much more substance than the regular cakey fig cake/ pudding. The part I always go for is the crust, because it's extra chewy and caramelized. I always order the cake heated, and topped with a scoop of soy-barley ice cream.

Anotai Vegetarian Restaurant

976/17 Soi Rama 9 Hospital

Tel: 02-641-5366

My favorite indulgence

On my birthday this year, J and I went to Le Beaulieu to celebrate. It's a cozy yet chic little French restaurant within the Sofitel service residence in Asoke. We've got sweet memories with this place--it was where J and I celebrated his birthday in 2006. We pretty much had the entire second floor balcony to ourselves, and despite the fact that it was his birthday, he brought me a super romantic present. =)

Anyway, back to the topic of food. I remembered that food at Le Beaulieu was good, but not mind-blowingly so. This time, however, I was pleasantly surprised by one of their dishes--foie gras terrine paired of toasted homemade brioche, red wine poached pear and arugula salad with reduced balsamic vinegar dressing. (Food description these days are so long, sometimes it sounds like horrible English to me.)

Terrine is my preparation of choice for foie gras--sauteed ones tend to be too greasy for my taste, even though technically it is less greasy than the terrine version since much of the fat has been rendered off in the cooking process. I have ordered foie gras terrine at many top French restaurants, be it in Bangkok, Singapore or San Francisco. My favorite one before Le Beaulieu's was at Ame in San Francisco. But Le Beaulieu's terrine is now the champion in my heart. Why?

The terrine itself I'd say is typically high quality, the same as I'd get at any top French restaurant. But it was the red wine poached pear that made ALL the difference, particularly the perfect temperature of the pear--it was almost ice cold. I never knew that temperature could make such a difference; but the cold pear was the key to reducing the cloying greasiness of the foie gras that typically comes after the fifth bite. It literally was the reason I could almost finish the terrine all by myself (let's try not to think about the calories or worse, the cholesterol content)!

And to further enhance this foie gras terrine, I had an ice cold glass of Moscato d'Asti, a sweet white wine from Italy. My first experience with the Moscato d'Asti was at a friend's house in the Bay Area at a wine and cheese party (oh how I miss those days), and I remembered it so well after all this time because it had such a nice, light sweetness to it. Not syrupy like Sauternes or ice wine at all, and the best part was the fresh lychee aroma. I'm not great with describing wine; I mean, I literally know nothing about wine except which ones I like, so maybe the right adjective is not exactly lychee, but that's how it was to me.

The rest of the food at Le Beaulieu was just ok. It was crazy pricey though, and I'd seriously only go back there for the foie gras terrine.

Le Beaulieu

Sofitel Residence Asoke

50 Sukhumvit 19

Tel: 02-207-3333

Artery clogging ramen (I meant that in a good way)

My good friend's boyfriend just opened a Japanese ramen franchise in Sukhumvit 39. It's one of the most famous ramen chains in Japan that he discovered when he went to a ramen fair in Tokyo last year. Must have been quite an eating spree....going from booth to booth until he found the best tasting ramen!

Anyway, this place is called Bankara Ramen, and its signature ramen is called (duh) the Bankara Ramen. The soup is a mixture of shio and tonkotsu soup. I believe shio is a clear salt based soup, while tonkotsu is a white creamy pork bone soup simmered for hours and hours.

The noodles, stewed bamboo shoots, soup base and even things like corn and dried seaweed are all imported from Japan, hence the above average pricing. The ramen here come pretty lightly 'dressed,' so you have to order extra toppings. The must-order ones are:

• Tamago aka stewed egg. This is so delicious I can just eat it on its own. The egg white is tender and very flavorful after hours of simmering in the soup. And the yolk! My goodness, I have a weakness for oozy yolk, and this one oozes like golden lava. It's gooey and oozy, and surprisingly sweet. Like I said, it's a must-order.

• Kakuni aka stewed pork belly in dark soy sauce. Layers of juicy, tender pork meat alternating with thick strips of fat, which I of course painstakingly remove. But the labor was all worth it. And if you haven't had enough of the kakuni from the ramen, you can always order the Kakuni rice, which has rice topped with generous portions of kakuni, poached egg (again, oozy goodness), seaweed flakes and drizzles of mayo.

• Stewed bamboo shoots. The bamboo shoots here are by far the best in Thailand and Mountain View, CA (well, that's the scope of my ramen experience). So fat and unbelievably juicy. I like it so much that I usually order it on its own as appetizer, dressed with fresh spring onion, sesame oil and chilli!

I personally prefer the Tonkotsu ramen more than the signature Bankara ramen. The tonkotsu soup here is very rich and flavorful compared to all the others that I have tasted elsewhere. Of course, I top mine with both tamago and kakuni (not shown in the pic below), and despite feeling grossly full at the end, I can vouch that it's completely worth it.

Bankara Ramen

The Manor at Sukhumvit 39

Tel: 02-662-5162

Back after 18 months!

This was meant to be a blog for sharing stuffs with close friends, but it emails just worked better...so I've neglected this blog for 18 whole months!

But since I'm stuck at home post appendectomy, I decided to update this blog with stuffs that can't be easily shared by emails. Like loads and loads of food pictures, coz those just take so long to load. So, I'll be updating this blog whenever I have time with my food finds, both in Bangkok and my travels elsewhere.

Get ready to drooooooooooooooool!