Category: Zeitgeist

As the name almost suggests, Aquarium Cafe on Street 288 feels like the restaurant your fish-tank obsessed neighbour might open, if he lived in Japan. Half-a-dozen sturdy aluminum-and-wood tables sit snugly next to twice as many fish tanks, each populated with a different kind of tiny aquarium fish, or, in at least one case, a turtle (which you should not suggest eating, by the way, not even as a joke). The cafe menu, which reads back-to-front, Japanese style, stretches several pages long and includes a mix of Thai, Khmer, Western and Japanese dishes. Burgers ($5) come with a free beer and the drink list includes an avocado smoothie ($2.50). The house specialty is udon noodles, priced from $4-$7, which can be topped with a list of standards such as kimchi, fish paste and eggplant.

Aquarium Cafe Renature, #35 Street 288.

The food is good at Fox, the service near excellent and the urban-industrial interiors as slick as anything in Soho or East London. The 17-dish starter menu includes shareable small plates such as salmon skewers ($4.9), Ricotta cheese balls ($4) and grilled Spanish sausage ($6). Soups, salads, pastas and mains fill out the rest of the board. Service is snappish, the staff friendly. The cement-and-exposed-metal décor, complete with oak caskets and an above-ground wine cellar, affects a culinary swagger somewhere between classic French vineyard and upper-crust vino lounge. Yet as near-outstanding as the dining experience may be, the vino lounge remains the raison d’etre of Fox, whose wine list stretches to near-triple digits (and the prices most certainly do). The cheap stuff – Anakena Cabernet Sauvignon from Chile – registers just $19 a bottle. But there are dozens of other choices north of $100, with the 2007 Chateau Lynch Bages from France topping the list at $280. No one ever said being foxy was cheap.

Fox Wine Bar & Bistro, 104 Sothearos Blvd; 090 625656.   

Prancing silver carousel ponies suspended from the ceiling; ‘High Heels On The Moon’ scrawled atop the door in neon luminescence; vast steel-framed spotlights straight from a 1950s movie shoot: it can only be the latest creation by the boys from uber-salon The Dollhouse, they of Glamazon fame. Sprawl on vast communal sofas on the disco-ball-trimmed mezzanine, or hunker down in the decadent depths of the plush, swallow-you-whole, black and fushcia pink sofas. Choose your drinks wisely: mai tais and mojitos are relegated to the menu’s ‘Boring List’. Top of ours was the $6 monthly special, in this case the Dirty Whore’s Bath – ‘Who needs soap when you have a cocktail?’ – a heady concoction of gin, benedictine, Cointreau, grapefruit and soda water. Ouch.

Emergency Room, #82 Street 244; 016  620907. 

There comes a certain time when all that’s reuired for basic survival is the facility to watch sports on ostentatiously oversized television screens. With Wimbledon in full tennis-elbowed swing, now is very much That Time. At Slur, one of the newest watering holes on the ever-ascendant Street 172 sporting wall-sized graffiti murals by local artist Peap Tarr and a generous stage and pool table, you won’t be alone – plus there is ample boozage and bar food to keep the most hardened sports fan sustained. Slur, #28 Street 172.

The name Dusk Til Dawn conjures apparitions of dead Texas cowboys and haunted brothels in the Mexican desert, but the movie by Robert Rodriguez had no influence on the sixth-floor sunrise bar of the same name on Street 172, where Bob Marley and Gambian art embellish the walls, panoramic views surround the open-air rooftop lounge and the sounds of reggae play as free and easy as the sky-high breeze. The crowds are sometimes thin at dusk, when during rainy season the clouds are thick and the sunsets muted. But morning skies are clear and brilliant, and the crowds from across the way amble over at the end of the night to begin a new day.

Dusk Til Dawn, #46 Street 172; 017 839546.

Her name is Khemara, the formal for ‘Khmer’, and when she smiles she does so broadly. Mara, the new Riverside bar which takes its name from hers, is elegant but not to the point of being elitist. Its impossibly charming chief hostess will regale you with tales of life in the provinces while you gorge on standard cocktail-bar fare against a backdrop of standard cocktail-bar decor, pausing every now and then only to remind you to swallow as you listen, open-mouthed. A burger the size of your hand is $6; the espressos pack a powerful, caffeine-gloved punch. Mara, #83 Sisowath Quay.

When French novelist, poet and playwright Jules Verne packed fictional adventurer Phileas Fogg off to circumnavigate the planet, it was to be a full 80 days before the rascal returned from his mission. Amateur! In one evening at the recently opened new-wine-bar-on-the-block, Zino, you can hop from Spain to Italy to France to Morocco and back without breaking a sweat. The menu, by a Michelin-starred chef, is global; the wine references number more than 100. Specials include the sumptuous-sounding sea bass wrapped in parma ham ($15). Slate floors, split levels, a sweeping staircase and tables in intimate corners only add to the sophistication. Be on your best behaviour, or as near as dammit. Zino, #12 Street 294

Momo Milk Green Tea and Mochi is the kind of place most BKK1 coffee shops would aspire to being if they could fire all of their accountants. The clientele is more carefree college kid than smug yuppie. Nothing on the menu costs more than $1.75. Eighty percent of the seating is floor cushions and Japanese-style floor tables. And it’s not uncommon for customers to kick off their shoes and get horizontal. Or bring guitars and start singing. En masse. For extra style points, the mochi ice cream – Japanese mochi balls with ice cream inside – is a chewy, creamy, colourful flourish of J-Pop culture. Momo Milk Green Tea & Mochi, #5 Street 105.