Sra Bua is described as a “progressive Thai” restaurant, which was awarded 1 star in Michelin’s first guide to Bangkok, published in December 2017.  We chose to get to it using Bangkok’s SkyTrain metro, because the restaurant, inside the Siam Kempinski Hotel, is very close to Siam station, but we didn’t study the finer details of access and ended up walking around the Siam Paragon shopping mall’s carpark area before we found the entrance to the Siam Kempinski Hotel. But, as we found on our return, it’s much easier just to walk through the mall, to the far side of its Siam station entrance.  Siam mall is full of western designer boutiques as well as a large department store, and it’s through the department store’s food hall on the ground floor that you should walk to the Kempinski Hotel; you’ll be amazed at the quality of the produce on sale, which is more akin to Harrods’ food hall than a Thai marketplace.  Siam station was buzzing with the energy and optimism of youths on a Saturday night out; I loved it!

As you enter the ground floor restaurant lighting is much more subdued than in the hotel lobby area, and you’re invited to sit in a calm reception area and offered (computer) tablets to view the menus on.  It all looked great, so we selected “The Journey”, an eight course menu, plus its wine flight.  We were given a chilled lemongrass drink, cold towel, and then a selection of “street food” snacks served (and sometimes assembled) at our romantically-dim-lit reception area banquette with low table.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a meringue with wasabi mayo and an edible ‘plastic’ bag containing roasted cashew nuts; both very nice.

Crispy chicken skin with peanut ice cream followed by a prawn cracker and prawn gel gently introduced the Thai flavours we’d come to enjoy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the third round of snacks we were presented with egg custard in miso, a tuna tartare with coconut cream inside a lotus flower, which was great but there was only one mouthful to enjoy, and a chicken sausage on a stick, served in a smoke filled cloche.  We were told this represented the exhaust fumes of the ubiquitous Bangkok Tuk-Tuks, but I can assure you it was nothing like engine emissions!

Then a waitress brought a trolly to us, from which she prepared a spicy concoction of (something Thai I didn’t catch) which was wrapped in a leaf and eaten in one go. It was pretty spicy (hot), although we were asked how spicy we wanted the ‘wrap’ before she made it.  After that was wolfed down we were taken to our table in the restaurant proper.  Overall score for snacks: 9/10

The dining room is elegant and calming, with very high ceilings, teak floors and walls, several lotus-filled water features and large rugs on the floor to dampen the noise of chatter.  I appeared to be one of only two western customers, the rest being Chinese tourists or Thai.  I should get out of this habit of guessing nationalities, because it’s embarrassing when I get it wrong.  Mr A was assumed by everyone to be a local throughout our visit to the kingdom, but he doesn’t speak a word of Thai. (Mr A is ethnic Malay)

A theatrical array of four items were presented to us as our first starter, and the waiter said, “the chef wants to take you to the beach”. There was a crab salad with yellow curry in a filo pastry cone, a Laksa soup hidden beneath a shell, on a sandy beach scene within a coconut shell, which one drank through a straw, oyster tempura with a miso mayo, and some BBQ squid on a stick, which was briefly reheated on a small BBQ at the table before being dunked in an egg yolk, in an eggshell.  We were told to eat them in that order!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The crab was flavoursome, but then the soup was quite hot (in temperature), so it took me a while to finish it without burning my mouth. And it felt a bit too odd to be drinking from a straw poking out of a mound of sand. So by the time I got to the tempura its batter wasn’t crispy, and the squid had gone cold and was rubbery.  IMHO to preserve warmth and texture it would have been better not to have served all these four plates together. 6/10

Starter no.2 was seabass served with a cucumber soft meringue, a mooli, cucumber and coriander slaw, peanut crumb and a spicy Thai sauce with yuzu. The bass was cooked a pointe, but it’s skin wasn’t crispy. Everything else was nice, light and refreshing, but personally I thought there was too much coriander on the plate, shouting over more delicate whispers of flavour. 7.5/10

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our third appetiser was Hokkaido scallop, served with carrot and a Pad Thai sauce. There was just one plump scallop, but the plate looked very pretty with the addition of flower petals. The shellfish was well cooked; translucent, but I’m really not sure the rest of the ingredients worked – it was all too sweet. 6.5/10

Appetiser no.4 was pan fried foie gras.  I’m regularly surprised and delighted by how often foie gras is served in restaurants in Asia, most often in French food restaurants. In this instance, Sra Bua was trying to marry French and Asian cuisine by serving the liver blanketed in a ginger foam. But, for my palate, it didn’t work very well.  But it was served with a very nice gewuerztraminer 7.5/10

 

 

 

Our fifth and final appetiser was (rightly) a Sra Bua signature dish: ‘frozen lobster red curry’ with a lychee foam. Red Curry ice cream was made at the table, using liquid nitrogen, which added theatre to one’s anticipation. The lobster was barely cooked, but was excellent in the mouth, and the novel sensation of a freezing cold, yet spicy sauce really worked on me. 9/10. Unfortunately during this course I started to get the abdominal pains I sometimes get when I eat too much.  My first reaction is to slow down my consumption, but that lead to Mr A’s plates being taken away before I had finished, in the ‘American style’, which irritates me!  So then I called over a waiter and the manager to give them heads up that, due to a medical condition I was going to have to finish my meal after the next course, and asked if it would be possible to take any of the remaining dishes away in a doggy bag.  Sadly it wasn’t, due to the nature of the dishes, which I fully understood and accepted.

My final dish, the single main course on the menu, was Australian wagyu. I’ve never had Australian wagyu taste as good, or be as tender, as the real stuff in Japan, and this was no exception. It came with a Massiman curry, which, on a better day, should have had a little more punch. Also on the plate was a small plastic bag (this time not edible) containing top quality house-made potato crisps. We drank a very pleasant zinfandel from Sonoma. 7/10 The grape was a good choice, but it might have been more gastronomically creative if the wine originated in Australia, like the beef.

 

And so we had to bring our dinner to a premature end, missing two desserts and their wines. The manager took Baht200 off our food bill and Baht300 off the wine bill, each, (roughly £24 in total), which left me with a bill of THB11,358 (roughly £270).

I thought Sra Bua was an attractive dining space with good service and the food was generally pretty good with a couple of outstanding dishes. But sometimes I felt the kitchen struggled to properly marry the progressive flavour combinations.  I accept though that my stomach problems and my personal dislike of too much coriander might have driven me towards lower scores than others might give.  But others might also argue that one can get very good Thai food on the streets of Bangkok at a fraction of the prices at Sra Bua.  I do agree that the restaurant is worthy of its 1 Michelin star. Overall 7.5/10