Restaurant reviews

Over the years, countless people have told me the reason Thai places haven’t been much cop in Barcelona is because the food is too spicy for local palates. Perhaps they’ve not had a good look at who constitutes the ‘local’ palate these days: Brits, French, Danish, Dutch, German, Austrian, Swedish, Australian, American along with the Spanish and Catalans—all of them out there and looking for a little something to brighten the taste buds of an evening. On the night of my visit, a good many of them were at Bangkok Café, which, I’m happy to report, dumbs down for no man.

You’ll find a liberal sprinkling of fresh, hot chillies and other aromatics in their dishes, which are marked out by hand-drawn chillies on the menu to indicate hotness and that really mean what they say i.e. bit spicy, average spicy, very spicy. I’ve long maintained that Asian restaurants in Barcelona should give their punters credit for being a bit more daring than they think and this was a case in point: it was rammed, it was excellent, it is a breath of fresh air and, please God, long may it continue.

Bangkok is a sweet little place, with recipes chalked up on blackboard over the windows, and a kitchen that defies the odds by turning out a vast array of dishes from a space barely big enough to swing a cat. Yet, like so many similarly tiny restaurants in the motherland— not to mention the street food vendors—what comes out of it is fresh, lively, crowd-pleasing stuff, that reminds you why you love food in the first place.

It took a while and a bottle of Singha each before we got served, but once these people get going service is speedy and no-nonsense with dishes arriving hot and perfectly timed. We had Pho Phia Thai (fried vegetable rolls) with a slick of Sriracha sauce—a ubiquitous hot chilli sauce, easily bought in Asian supermarkets here—and a sweet-sharp dipping sauce sprinkled with crushed peanuts, along with Ha Kao (steamed shrimp and vegetable dumplings), popping with juicy deliciousness. Larb Kai—a traditional Laotian salad consisting of minced chicken on a bed of baby gem lettuce leaves—had been generously tossed with sliced green chillies, mint and spring onions, each complementing the other brilliantly, the chillies robust and deeply flavoured with a heat that sneaks up on you over mouthfuls rather than blowing your head off in one bite. A rather delicate Som Tam (green papaya salad) laced with red chilli and tiny dried shrimp made an excellent refresher course before mains that were very good, if not quite so tastebud dazzling as the starters.