March 11, 2022

As a Christmas present, Martin and Ellen gave us a dinner at a fancy restaurant, and it was so cool, and we took so many pictures, that I'm going to devote a blog post just to that. 

We chose to go to Restaurant Sühring, a fine dining German restaurant started by two brothers, that some people say is the best restaurant in Bangkok (dang). The restaurant is in a beautiful converted villa in Chong Nonsi, and you walk through the garden to enter.

We were seated in a lovely glass-walled room, with the garden all around us. We started with an amuse bouche that was a kind of gougere with warm speck. 

We chose the five course tasting menu, and then ordered some Indian tonic mocktails.

Our first course had three small bites--a very pretty pink bite with smoked eel, a warm baked bite with speck and cheese and a quail egg (our favorite), and a kind of meringue filled with a soft cheese, which was kind of like trashy food done classy.

Then came a dish with rolled mackerel, and little apple puffs that you bit into to a kind of gelee inside. There were far too many components for me to remember them all, but this dish was meant to represent the heavens and the sea. 

After that they brought us the bread. Oh, the bread! They began their starter a year before the restaurant opened and let us smell it. The recipes are based on the breads the chefs' mother used to bake, and they cut us warm slices of sourdough, a dark loaf made with pumpkin seeds, and little pretzel rolls. They served the bread with butter they churn in-house with imported German milk (!). They served a plain butter, herb butter, and tomato butter.

Then came an amazing lobster dish--very gently poached lobster with a lobster bisque, candied disks of sweet potato, spheres of sea buckthorn and vanilla, and a couple drops of pumpkin seed oil. 

Next was a turbot with caviar, an artichoke flan, and a dumpling with smoked mussels. It came with a deliciously complex and creamy sauce, and then a little tarragon sauce poured over that. 

Next came our main courses. I ordered the pigeon breast, which was tender and rare and not gamey at all. It came with a savory salsify tartlet with a blue cheese crisp and a coffee jus. Roman had the wagyu, which was slow poached and served with endive, jus, and a little tuille. All very good.

Finally, we had our first dessert course--a lovely confection of raspberries, gelée, frozen yogurt balls, a kind of creamy cheese, and a beet chip on top. They instructed us to break apart the beet chip and a dark red sphere filled with sauce, and it was an amazing combination of sweet, tart, creamy, crunchy, and soft.

And lastly, we were served three beautiful petit fours. One was a raspberry macaron with white chocolate cheesecake mousse, one was a black forest bite, and one was a lemon bite with a very tart lemon shell, creamy lemon mousse, and a crumbly shortbread cookie. We had them with a lemongrass pandan butterfly pea tea, which was lovely, and very, very blue. 

It was a special night. Thank you, Martin and Ellen! That was something!