Japanese Serenity Set Back From Bangkok’s Hustle and Bustle
January 19th, 2009
Royal Vanilla
Bangkok, Thailand – Way out on Ekkamai Soi 12, amidst gardens and fountains, sits a quiet Japanese complex made up of dim sum house Royal Vanilla, coffee and pastry shop Vanilla Café and bookstore Sauce. The café sports clean wooden lines and an airy minimalist cool, but its food, unfortunately, doesn’t live up to the same precision. When I tried to order the daifuku and mochi on display, I was told the store was out and that the displays were, knock-knock, models only in the great Japanese tradition of plastic representations of food. Why the displays weren’t removed when the pastries sold out is beyond me, but there was nothing to be done about that at that point so I ordered a matcha redbean cake and a latte. The cake – layers of mint-green genoise, raspberry purple and tea green pastry creams, and a rippling whipped cream top dusted with green tea powder – was pretty, but that’s where it began and ended. The matcha génoise had the texture of a dry sponge, the whipped cream was flavorless and homogenized and the flavors of the cake layers, pastry creams and whipped cream didn’t come come together. After choking down a few bites, I tried to wash it down with a few sips of latte, which tasted like coffee grounds, and as pretty as the setting was, the food was too disappointing to keep me in my seat. Maybe a hot tea next time.
After leaving the café, I meandered over to the stylish bookstore Sauce, where, thankfully, what you see is what you get. The downstairs houses an impressive display of new western cookbooks, like Pork & Sons and Creole from artsy publishing house Phaidon and commercial hits like Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook, alongside art/design coffee table books and modern Thai literature. While the downstairs cookbooks command the same prices as in the west, the upstairs displays a host of beautifully designed Thai cookbooks for a fraction of the price.
The game plan for next time: eat before, tea in the cafe, cookbook shopping to finish it off.
Matcha Redbean Cake
Books in Vanilla Café
Sauce Bookstore
Upstairs at Sauce Bookstore
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