Paste is a progressive/modern Thai restaurant located at Gaysorn Village (3rd Floor, Gaysorn, 999 Ploenchit Road, Lumpini, Bangkok 10330, tel : +66 2 656 1003). Our first progressive Thai food restaurant experience in all our trips here, run by husband and wife chefs Jason Bailey and Bee Satongun
The food can be described as exploratory and experimental to some extents, making use of locally gathered ingredients that used to be a big part of Thai cuisine in the past but have fallen out of use for some reasons in this era.
What Paste is doing with their food is to re-introduce those ingredients (many herbs and edible flowers) into traditional/aristocratic/provincial dishes while keeping the core flavour profiles of those dishes intact and recognizable.
We had a welcome drink of bael juice.
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| Patrón Silver tequila, orange liquor, homemade ginger lime syrup & lemongrass powder |
And sipped on some ginger margarita while waiting for the food.
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| amuse bouche |
Then came amuse bouche of some pretty looking prawn toasts.
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| watermelon & ground salmon with crispy shallots, roasted galangal powder |
This starter was outstanding. The ground salmon tasted like a sweet and salty fish floss, paired with a chilled sweetness of watermelon balls and umami brine from the pearls of ikura. Excellent with white rice.
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| coconut cream soup of galangal, chicken with chilli jam & premium plankton paste |
Their coconut soup was a rendition of tom kha gai. These guys have a hydraulic coconut press in the kitchen so any milk required can be freshly extracted. Flavour was awesome just like I had imagined with some creamy richness from the coconut and loads of tanginess. The chicken was rolled into cylinders like a roulade and I think they had some coconut meat in them. Not sure where was the plankton paste though.
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| Shan minority group stir fry of salted and cured pork, fiddlehead fern, turmeric, dried fish & fermented soya beans |
This dish of stir fried pork and fiddlehead ferns was new for us. I'm getting a load of savoury, umami flavours with some heat and a lot of crunchy textures from the vegetables and nutty things. Not forgetting a nice aroma from the fermented beans. Those salted pork they mentioned tasted like sausages.
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| rice, the only normal thing we had |
With all those delicious saucy flavours, it would be a crime if we didn't get some white rice to go along.
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| pomelo salad of char-grilled Carabinero prawns from Spain, Asian citron, homemade-chilli jam and gapi khoei plankton paste |
The flavour bombs continued with their pomelo salad with Carabinero prawns. Paste's elevated and kickass rendition of yum som o. That chilli jam and plankton paste was so good that we would have wanted to lick them off the plate. And yes, those prawns provided a toasty crustacean flavour to the salad, along with a bit of tomalley richness.
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| Shitake mushroom white chocolate parfait , with lychee sorbet, chocolate truffles and Thai nectarine |
Dessert was some shitake mushroom chocolate parfait. Not really getting the mushroom flavour but the lychee sorbet was awesome. The sorbet was rich and sticky with lychee flavours and bits of meat from the fruit. Maybe a request for individual servings of that sorbet the next time if they still have them.
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| chocolate truffle with Thai rum |
Some mignardises in the form of chocolate truffles, rum-mified.
And an espresso to help ward against the post lunch coma.
Though I don't think it's going to help much.
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