Thailand
Simply the best top end Thai cuisine you'll taste in Bangkok outside a five-star hotel. It's not expensive but the whole dining experience will blow you away. I've lived in Asia for 25 years and can honestly say this is Thai food at its best.
Fish & chips, bangers & mash, pasties, pies, ... in Banglamphu!
A clean, airy place. Away from the sewer smells, noise and pollution. Oh My Cod! has seating in cubicles, each with flat-screen TV (you've been warned), outside where you can watch the koi carp, or you can sit at a normal 'cafe' table inside.
Pies and pasties are homemade. Warning: the pasty is big. Don't eat if you plan to walk around the palaces.
Oh yeah they have wifi too.
Located down Soi Rambuttri, turn down the alley near 7-Eleven.
Wonderful restaurant on the west of the river. Not cheap, but worth every penny for the great food, cocktails, service, view and private river boat. Has traditional dance displays at the weekend.
Opposite the Grand Palace next to Wat Rakhang in Thonburi.
Just the maddest restaurant in Thailand. It's an enormous German beer hall that brews its own (very good) beer and seats about 1,500.
They serve German and Thai food and have cabaret every night - a mixture of traditional Thai and pop music. It's mostly Thais who go, and they all seem to be there to celebrate something and the whole place ends up dancing - at least in part because the staff insist on making you dance. Good if you're in a crowd, it's a truly Thai, if unexpected, experience. You'd need to book - it keeps going until about 2am.
Rama III- you'll probably need a cab. See www.tawandang1999.com/en/eng/detail.asp
Sawadee cap, must visit place is the 360 bar on the top floor of the Millennium Hilton. Great view and see the sunset. Make sure you be there around 17.30 hr, have a cocktail and enjoy the view of Bangkok and Chaopraya river.
After this have dinner at Spasso in the Grand Hyatt in Erawan. At 10 pm the live band starts, so if you are already in, you do not have to pay the cover charge of Baht 650.
Also try the lunch buffet at the Four Seasons Hotel and dinner Buffet at Novotel at Siam Square. The food and desserts are out of this world. Buffet at the Four Seasons is about 600 baht and at Novotel 650. But it's worth it. If you are looking for good DJ music than QBAR is your place.
Anyway Bangkok is a very polluted city but you can enjoy yourself very much. Watch out for the Tuk tuk seafood and jewelry scam and beware that if everybody is trying to making a living and tourists are part of it.
Four Seasons: Poenchit Road
Grand Hyatt: Poenchit Road
Novotel: Siam Square
Qbar: Sukhumvit
Every backpacker knows Bangkok's Khao Sanh Road, but running parallel to it is a much lesser-known alley with all the cheap hostels, bars, restaurants and shops you find on the main drag. Just far less crowded and frenetic.
Find your way to the Khao Sanh road in the Banglamphu area: Trok Mayom lies just to the north. Walkable also from Phra Athit river pier.
Not a bad place for a pizza - good food, decent atmosphere, always buzzy with a lot of people coming and going, and drinkable house wine in carafes.
Sukhumvit Soi 11
Cheap, freshly cooked vegan/vegetarian food in the backpacker area of Bangkok. Particularly recommended are the Thai Green and Massaman curries with tofu.
May also runs half-day cooking courses that are well worth trying out, though a touch pricey - in Thai terms - at 1000baht (£12). Each course includes a hair-raising tuk-tuk trip to the markets to get the essential Thai ingredients followed by hands-on tuition for 10 or so dishes. You'll be eating each one after you make it so skip breakfast that morning.
Cross the road perpendicular to the Burger King end of the Khao San Road and find the restaurant in the alleyway behind. It's very easy to find if you have a map.
www.maykaidee.com
It's a restaurant come guesthouse situated in Trok Mayom which is an alley that runs parallel to Koh San Road. It does by far and away the best food in that area and they also sell wine by the glass which is difficult to find. For those not yet used to the delights of firey food it does a fab western menu in tandem to the best currys I have ever tasted (try the Massaman). As a guesthouse it's not great but it is cheap.
Runs paralell to Koh San Road
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