Saturday 6 August 2011

Bangkok: Espresso

It has been almost 5 years since I last met L, my good friend from postgrad days in Birmingham. So to learn that she came back to Thailand for a short visit from Canada, where she lives now, me and P arranged a dinner with L to catch up the good ol' wicked days. L suggested that we should dine at Espresso in Intercontinental Hotel for their seafood night. It was Baht1500++ per person so after browsing some reviews around the web, I was looking forward to their food.

As soon as we entered the restaurant, we were greeted with a long line of food. I only managed to snap the seafood bit of the line and as you can see; prawns, oysters, mussles and crabs are waiting for you!

I started off with some small plate starters. Clockwise from the Top left; their hummus was rather dry and bland. The thing was I couldn't find anything to dip it with. No carrot or cucumber sticks, not even pita bread. Quite disappointing. Next is shrimp cocktail. It was good and interesting since they have cocktail sauce in that small tube. Next are seared scallop with potato salad and jelly fish with sesame oil. I like these two.

Interesting thing about Japanese sashimi & sushi line here is that they didn't cut the fish and put on plate for you to take. You have to ask the chef what fish you want and they will cut them for you. I think this is a great way to preserve the freshness of sashimi and sushi. Pure love for this one.

Their hot and sour soup is quite up-scaled as they put some shark fin in it. Taste wise is good but this is hard for me who actually made up my mind that i won't eat shark fin anymore. So last night, the shark must forgive me for consuming that.

Finally, my cold seafood plate. Oysters were incredibly fresh so having that with Thai spicy seafood sauce was pure bliss. Mussle and crab were okay. I think I finally learn that I love fresh crab more than those boiled and frozen crabs even though they were Alaska King Crab. The sweetness of crab wasn't there.

I made a visit to grilling station and picked lamb, salmon patty, seabass on skew and rock lobster for grilling. Lamb was the winner of the night. No smell or after taste, very tender and very well seasoned. I love their mint jelly too, always prefer mint jelly over mint sauce. So good that I went back for another two. I should have eaten just lamb last night - seriously good.

Chinese and Thai corner was okay. Roasted duck was okay. Soft shell crab with black pepper was awesome anyway, still crispy though made for a while. Char siu bun was good. Dumpling was so so. Fried rice and Thai steam fish paste (Hor Mok - ห่อหมก) were medicore.

They had small pot of cottage pie so I tried. It was so so. Had some salad to balance out. I would say the choice of salad here was pretty disappoint. Only some leafy stuffs and a corner where you can make caesar salad. For salad crazy like me, I would love to see more choices of vegetable. Their caesar salad corner was nice since they have even anchovy, parmigiano, croutons and bacon bits for you to add as much as you want. I had a plate of that at the end of the night. Up to my liking coz I can put salad dressing in the amount that I like which isn't too soggy.

Their dessert lines are actually quite massive with choices of fresh fruits, cakes, fountain chocolate, souffle, ice cream and even Thai dessert like sticky rice and mango! I only had their vanilla and chocolate ice cream which was okay. L said their mango ice cream was great so she went for another round. I guess if you like sweet stuff, this could be something for you.

I ended the night with cheese plate. Loving my Brie there so much. So creamy, so heavenly. We had green tea as complimentary to wrap up the night. It was a very enjoyable evening since we haven't seen each other for a long time now esp. altogether like this. So much to catch-up and gossip about. We even talked about the good old days in Birmingham, all the glam and not so glam about it. We started at 6.30 pm and finished at 10.05 pm. What a night isn't it!

Espresso
Intercontinental Hotel
Bangkok
Tel
02 656 0444
BTS: Chid Lom


ดูแผนที่ขนาดใหญ่ขึ้น

1 comment:

  1. Yum...lamb! I've been thinking about trying one of these hotel buffets. I'm almost done with my classes, so after that, let's get dinner when you're free.

    ReplyDelete