It’s been about three weeks since I dined at “Le Du Bangkok” but that meal is still vividly etched in my memory as a string of superlatives.
Having only been exposed to Modern Thai cuisine for the first time ever at that point, I basically sat through my entire dinner in wide-eyed wonder, as my tastebuds were taken on a joyride of Thai spices and ingredients prepared using fine dining techniques.
One of the courses that left a particularly deep impression on me was the Local River Prawn with Organic Black Rice. It featured a tom yum bisque that was thickened with prawn brain and airy-light bits of crunchy scrambled egg. The rice which came from Pai, a town in the Mae Hong Soon Province of Northern Thailand, was cooked risotto style but instead of cheese, shrimp paste was used. Honest to goodness, I was blown away by how incredible it tasted after I followed the instructions to mix in the sweet pork belly jam, diced onion, fresh chilli padi, long beans and sour mango. So yup, as hard as it may be to imagine, that modest looking mound of carb practically stole the show from the giant prawn. And that’s saying a lot considering how sumptuously sweet that prawn was.