Cafe Chilli is a north-eastern Thai food restaurant situated at the basement of Paragon in Bangkok, where most of the restaurants are. Although it says north-eastern, it really a fusion high class north-eastern food. In all honesty, most of us probably don’t really like authentic north-eastern or Issan food, because they can be really spicy and salty. However, despite this fusion stuff going on, its true to Thai tastes and flavors. The portions are pretty small, so for two of us, we actually ended order quite a number of dishes.
Som Tum (or raw papaya salad) is probably the most ubiquitous of all Thai meals. If a restaurant does a bad Som Tum, you can forgot about any other food being too good. Chilli doesn’t disappoint with this dish. A good Som Tum, to me, must have crunchy papaya shred, the dressing must have a fragrant sweet palm sugar taste, blended with a slightly pungent fish sauce and with a good measure of spiciness and sourness. You know that I like the Som Tum if you see me dipping my sticky rice into the sauce.
Now a bit about the role of the raw vegetables and sticky rice in Issan cuisine. Personally, I find that eating with sticky rice instead of cooked rice helps to reduce the spiciness of the dishes. The raw vegetable, especially, the cabbage seems also to play that role. Also its a good source of fibers. Now I just love my Thai dishes with sticky rice and raw vegetables.
For most people, Tom Yum is probably only Thai soup they know. There are a lot of others of course, but the more popular ones are Tum Kha Gai (chicken in coconut milk galangal soup), Gaeng Liang (a tamarind soup, which I don’t really fancy) and you have Tom Saab, a pork soup with similar flavour of Tom Yum but using pork instead of seafood or prawns. The soup here is a nice pork soup base with a well-infused herbal soup.
I love dish of fried chicken with lemon grass and those green bits are peppers. Eat all together and its a really unique and exciting taste. Definitely something I will order again.
The Kor Moo Yang (grilled pork neck) is simply soft and juicy. The marinade brings out the flavor in the grilling and its absolute mouth-watering and appetizing to even think about it.
Yum Ped Sarb (duck salad) is a bit spicy but the duck is was nice and chewy but easy to eat (not tough). The dressing is done just right with proper sour taste and fish sauce.
This is a weird fusion dish of salmon baked in dill. Didn’t really like it, but my friend Chris said he liked it. So its one against one.
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