Declining La Tavola, Renaissance Ratchaprasong BKK

I can only "sigh" to this once a super good restaurant... The only thing I still appreciate is their bread. Pizza is so so. Pasta is the worst - see the super thick sauce in it. Maybe one more thing to enjoy is their coffee. So next time I should just order a salad (complimentary with bread basket) and a coffee. Or the next time these 2 will be in the same consistency. 3 sighs....

My annual Khao Chae at Tea Room by Grand Hyatt BKK

April is a lovely month for the fall of Spring and the coming of Summer in HK, but already a heat summer in Thailand. The season for Khao Chae (rice in chilled jasmine water with condiments) (photo 6/9) is there again. I prefer the way Tea Room makes the chilled jasmine water - not too overwhelming but not too light. This time we had other dishes, as deep fried chicken pieces (photo 4), pomelo salad (5), stir fried bitter gourd leaves (7), steamed fish mousse (8) and Pad Thai (9/10). All are pretty nice and at some reasonable prices from THB160-280. *BTW, their Thai iced tea is pretty good too. Most of all, they serve the syrup on the side. So the Thai iced tea is just only slightly sweetened with the condensed milk.

2012 Spring Review: Falling favour with the Flavors, Cafe of Renaissance Ratchaprasong

While La Tavola and Fei Ya are still in good shape for delivering excellent food quality (service is still good in general for all the restaurants here), the Flavors disappointed me pretty much at my latest visit. The green salad and Thai beef salads are at average. The roasted spring chicken (photo 5) is very disappointing. It's about THB680 (half cut) but it's pretty dried out and the sauce is a bit heavy. The Pad Thai is another 180 degree turn around. Some marinated small shrimps were used and the stir fried isn't aromatic. It turned out it's just a stir and mix noodle with some soda-baking-feeling shrimps, which is so different from what they used to serve with nice fresh prawns and authentic tamarind aroma.

2012 Spring review: La Tavola, Italian restaurant, Hotel Renaissance, Ratchaprasong, BKK

Visited this Italian restaurant in the summer of 2011, and already got impressed with their service and food quality. Somehow the restaurant hasn't had a higher flow of customers on my recent visit, almost only 1 table of mine. However, the chef didn't get loose but delivered some very excellent dishes from pizza bread to the fruit salad dessert. La Tavola offers an incredible low price lunch set at THB350++, covering appetizer, main course and a dessert. On this lunch set I tried their sauteed mushroom, parma ham with baby rocket leaves salad as the appetizer, deep fried pork loin with french fried as main course and fruit salad with lychee sorbet as the dessert. The chef is very thoughtful in this arrangement for something refreshing as the dessert to offset the greasy flavour of the deep fried food from the main course. In fact, the pork loin and the french fried were handled so well that they taste very light and of course very crispy outside and moist inside. This lunch set really deserves a two-thumbs up!

Brunch buffet at Espresso, Cafe of InterContinental BKK

The brunch is indeed so eye catching. I just took one piece of each item (actually couldn't finish all the items) and so it created such an array of colorful food. The prime rib is the highlight - very nicely roasted and of some very good grade quality. The bread is awesome too. All the food are above average. The only complaint is on the lobster and some of the prawns which were not fresh. The lobster was served in a half portion quota for each guest. At this point, their lobster should have been served in a better quality. The imported strawberry was served just one time like a flower at a glance. I didn't get to taste it but got told it's really good.