Southeast Asia Travel Journal

Vanilla Brasserie is the fine dining offering of S & P, which also operates one of Thailand’s biggest chains of casual dining restaurants. While there are three or four Vanilla outlets in Bangkok, the flagship restaurant is the ‘Brasserie’ in Siam Paragon Shopping Mall. While S & P sells Thai food, the menu at Vanilla is strictly Western, with a lot of pasta dishes, soups, salads, sandwiches, etc.

You get three menus when you take a seat at Vanilla. One is the drinks menu, one the food, and then there’s a small list of chef’s specials. From the specials menu I selected the strawberry lime punch. Strawberry juice is getting quite popular around Bangkok these days, but this was something a little different. Sweet but a little tart as well.

Someone had highly recommended the burgers at Vanilla, but on the day the salads sounded much better. I decided to try the Italian Sausage Salad. Now, in Thailand you never know what you’re going to get when you order Italian sausage, except that it’s very unlikely that it will have any resemblance to what my mom got from the Italian butcher when I was a kid. In this case what I got was thin slices of dry pepperoni, grilled. Together with grilled peppers and the balsamic vinegar dressing, it was like eating a pizza, without the heavy carbs.

The light main course left room for a little dessert. There’s a display case full of delicious looking cakes at the front of the restaurant, while the menu has a long list of various crepe flavors. I decide on the lightest-looking option, the lemon-sugar crepes, and a hot cappuccino, The crepes were quite good, if perhaps a little overdone. The cappuccino was brewed by a barista who apparently did time at Starbucks, as it has all their hallmarks of extra stiff foam and a temperature that made it too hot to drink. The coffee itself was a good quality.

Vanilla is rather good for the price. You can get a good meal here for around 500 Baht per person.

Posted by michael under Restaurants
Tags: Bangkok • International
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