Vertigo, Banyan Tree Bangkok

I had heard about this place's 61st floor rooftop dining before (21/100 South Sathon Road, +66 2 679 1200), but a nice chichi restaurant was the last thing on my mind when being in Bangkok. Still, I was catching up with some old business colleagues tonight, and hence figured that it'd be a convenient place for a nice dinner and drinks too. It's a good thing that I didn't let my snobby "I hate posh restaurants" attitude get in the way, because this was actually pretty darned good in the end.

At first, it didn't seem like much, and I rather seemed to scorn at the fact that they brought out amuse bouche and sorbet, not to mention doing seemingly unnecessary things like covering each plate with one of those silver dome things and pouring soup out of a kettle at your table. Yet, they had a separate steak menu, so I went for an Australian ribeye (yeah, I passed on the pricey 6000 Baht or US$150 Matsuzaka beef). This turned out to be surprisingly tender and tasty (sorry for the crappy photo, but as you can imagine, it was pitch-dark up on that rooftop), and I just gobbled that stuff up. More impressively, they included some huge piece of roasted bone marrow as a side to every steak, which I also inhaled quickly, thanks to my newfound love of the stuff.

So that was a much nicer meal than I would have expected, and I wouldn't mind coming back here again for a business meal. Surprisingly, it wasn't too warm nor humid up there either...it was actually rather comfortable and refreshing rather than being covered in the smoggy haze or anything like that. It sounded like they had some huge fans blowing to help create a comfortable breeze, and yet it wasn't so strong that it blew everything all over the place either. This all fit in rather well in the end. Too bad that they didn't really have any Thai food on the menu though.