Behind Bo.Lan Essentially Thai is the husband-and-wife team, Thai-born Duangporn Songvisava and Australian-born Dylan Jones, who met while working for David Thompson’s famed Thai restaurant Nahm in London. Touted as one of the best Thai restaurants in Bangkok, the restaurant is well known for its modern spin on the traditional Thai cuisine.
They moved to this renovated mansion back in 2014 to secure more space to grow their own vegetables.
The colorful waiting area is a stark contrast to the rest of the house/restaurant that focuses more on warm wood furnishings and dim lighting.
Let's get the record straight first. I've never been very high on David Thompson’s Nahm in the past so there's really no reason to think that his two students could do anything special to make an impression on us this time. But as someone who loves food dearly, it's important to cross this one off my list.
A meal at Bo.Lan is by no means cheap in Thai or any international standard. Degustation dinner set starts at a hefty ฿1,980 while lunch sets are set at a more economical ฿980 per head.
We had the 5-course lunch set with salad, soup, a stir-fried dish, a curry dish and dessert (pick 1 out of 2 from each category). My Thai tea with milk was of course not included.
Our amuse bouche was a standard Thai vegetable salad with shredded pork.
After our amuse bouche, everything then all came at once on a wooden platter. Rather than going through every single dish in details, let's just touch on some of the more interesting ones.
Salad of grilled Spanish mackerel with local rosella. As expected, it was served cold. Average (4/10).
Better was the salad of grilled Ranong squid and lotus shoots with a very similar presentation (5/10).
Clear soup of free range chicken and pickled mustard green was again just so-so (4/10).
Next up was coconut cream based soup with local chicken, banana blossom and Vietnamese mint. Super milky and creamy which have been perfect for a sauce but a little too rich and heavy for me as a soup (2/10).
The stir-fried dishes provided the highlights of this meal. The turmeric fried market fish was decent though unexceptional (6/10).
The same could be said for the stir fried prawns with paddy oat leaves (6.5/10).
I thought both red curry tasted more or less the same. The red curry with grilled pork neck and green bananas was better in my opinion because of the succulent pork neck (6/10).
The red curry with chicken and winter melon was small and didn't seem to have a lot of chicken in it (5/10).
Well, at least rice is of the "all-you-can-eat" variety.
Dessert was a good one, sweet potato and shaved ice with some dragon eye. A very refreshing to an average Thai lunch (7/10).
It's a good thing that we came in without much expectation so we weren't totally disappointed about the outcome. But still it's a bit head-scratching to understand how everybody gets so hyped up talking about this place.
Food Rating: 5/10
Price: ฿฿฿฿
Address: 24 Sukhumvit 53 Alley, Khlong Tan Nuea, Bangkok, Thailand
Closest BTS Station: Thong Lo
Tel: +66 (0) 2260-2961
Website: www.bolan.co.th
S. Pellegrino Asia's 50 Best Restaurants: 37th (2015)
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