Bangkok for foodies

Best restaurants

Bangkok's restaurant map is not organised the way a guidebook wants it to be. The rooms worth eating in are scattered across the old royal quarter around Phra Nakhon, the shophouse alleys behind Charoen Krung, the student-and-office grid of Pathum Wan, and the Thonburi bank where the tourist tide never really reaches. This list follows that geography rather than fighting it. Twelve rooms, twelve postal codes, twelve reasons to cross a canal or a bridge: a pasta counter in a heritage lane, a Thai kitchen inside a boutique hotel, a riverside dining room on Song Wat, Korean and Japanese specialists in the Chulalongkorn belt, a hotpot address on Charansanitwong, wonton noodles near Maha Phruettharam temple, and a late-closing steakhouse inside MBK. The bundle is honest about what it can prove (a coordinate, a postcode, a set of opening hours, a phone number) and the prose below does not go a step further than that. Read it as a shortlist of rooms that reward the trip across town, not as a ranking of the city.