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