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Image 1: Located in one of the most expensive hotels in town is a modern Thai restaurant. It is sister restaurant of Kiin Kiin, a Michelin starred Thai restaurant in Denmark owned by a Thai-Danish restaurateur.
Image 2: We found the restaurant at the end of a long corridor on the ground floor…
Image 3: ...and that was where we had our lunch booked.
Image 4: The décor in the dining room was dominated by wooden beams providing a traditional ambience with a lotus pond at the entrance.
Image 5: There were a few private tables for couples along the side.
Image 6: There not many occupied tables during this weekday lunch.
Image 7: Our server quickly welcomed us with a refreshing lightly sweetened lemongrass ice tea, an ideal drink for such a hot day.
Image 8: Then three traditional snacks each offering interesting flavour interplay: Sweet cashew on salted meringue
Image 9: … crunchy lotus root crisps with kaffir lime dust
Image 10: … and a savoury prawn cracker with tomato dipping.
Image 11: The meal started with a bit of a visual effect gimmick for the first course. Hidden inside the salad were four small pieces of beautifully poached lobster perfectly paired with a wedge of creamy avocado.
Image 12: The centre of the plate had an exotic frozen red curry cream which was spicy but the cold temperature helped to reduce the intensity on my tongue. I particularly enjoyed the crunchy cashew nut underneath. Great opening, fun course with high quality ingredients.
Image 13: Next was diced Wagyu in a spicy and acidic dressing topped with watercress. Well marbled meat with a good balance of spice and vinaigrette.
Image 14: For seafood, fried fish where the skin was removed then deep fried and used as garnish. The fish itself was bland but had a good flaky texture. This course came with Tom Kha, a coconut base soup with chicken and lemon grass - aromatic but extremely sour; difficult to like!
Image 15: A green papaya spring roll resting on strips of grilled chicken with a traditional Nam Jim sauce that had a combination of salty, sweet, sour, and spicy! A bit too spicy for me but the fruity orange was seductive. The chicken was tender and juicy. Delicious course!
Image 16: Good rice - very fragrant and I was able to feel each grain. But come on, it's a 5-star hotel, at least form a neater scoop of rice.
Image 17: Presented in a martini glass was the first dessert, very sharp passion fruit sorbet! The intense kumquat peel marmalade made it worse while the condense milk wasn't sweet enough. Poor combination of flavours!
Image 18: The last dessert was more a pina colada combo. Beneath a coconut sphere was pineapple sorbet with rum. A much more pleasant dessert to wrap up our lunch.
Image 19: Carefully prepared cuisine using high quality ingredients with a touch of local flavours. If you are looking for a traditional cuisine, this isn't the place. Many described this as Thai cuisine with a Western influence, I would say it is more a Western cuisine with a Thai influence but whichever way you look at it, most courses did suit my palate.
