The Best Places in Thailand

Gins are kept cold behind the bar, but the piano on stage runs warm all night at this red-soaked cocktail bar inside Velaa Sindhorn Village. The room leans full cabaret, and the cocktail menu follows suit, with drinks built around jazz history and cultural lore from across the globe. By late evening, people are on their feet, which says something about the live performances and the pours in equal measure.

The durian colada is either the bravest cocktail in Bangkok or a personal challenge, depending on your feelings about salty durian foam. This cocktail bar on Sukhumvit 37 runs on disco-funk and an unapologetic willingness to put curry powder in a drink. A khao soi cocktail, bar snacks that include chicken wings stuffed with fermented pork sausage, and a disco ball overhead make for a room where nobody is standing still.

The third floor of a former printing house, bare cement walls and iron-grating windows left exactly as found. Ku Bar is a speakeasy-style cocktail bar that leans into the brutalist bones of old Thai architecture rather than papering over them. The menu rotates around whatever's good at the market, so the drinks shift with the season. Instagram makes it look intimidating, but the vibe is easygoing once you're up there.

A cocktail bar in Thong Lo where the menu reads like a Bangkok street-food tour, except the chicken rice arrives as a fizzy drink made with chicken skin-infused vodka and miso-ginger soda. The space is sleek and minimal, and the floor sits higher than the back of the bar, so you face the bartenders eye-to-eye, which feels oddly equalizing when you're sipping a mango sticky rice cocktail and reconsidering your life choices.

Every cocktail here is named after a single ingredient, then built from every part of it, cornsilk and all. Mahaniyom is a sustainability-forward cocktail bar in Bangkok where the kitchen-science ambition is worn lightly enough that the drinks still sound fun. The Cow, a savory-sweet blend of beef fat, brown butter, and blue cheese foam, is exactly the kind of thing you'd describe to someone the next day and watch their face move through several emotions.

A cocktail bar built around the idea that more people should be listening to vinyl, and it shows: the DJs at the record booth chat with nearby tables as they spin soul and hip-hop. The menu sorts drinks by mood and sensation rather than spirit, so you might find a warm gin and earl grey number filed under "gentle cuddles." The bartenders are the kind who actually want to talk, which keeps the whole thing from feeling precious.

Bartenders here breathe fire, literally spin bottles, and set the bar itself alight, so yes, it's that kind of night. This Cuban-tiki cocktail bar on Silom pulls both locals and visitors deep into afterparty territory, with a pandan coconut daiquiri and a DJ doing most of the convincing. A buy-one-get-one deal runs before nine, and the Mexican food stall out front, same owner, is hard to walk past without ordering something.

A cocktail bar in Pom Prap where the drinks lean on Thai herbal spirits and regional liqueurs you won't find on a standard back bar, and a live piphat ensemble or molam band fills the room on a given night. Those bands normally play theaters, so catching one here feels like an accidental stumble into something. Skewers come off a charcoal stove, rice arrives in bamboo. The whole thing is aggressively, cheerfully Thai, and the room knows it.

A giant LED tree rises through the center of the main bar on the 46th floor of the T-One Building, which tells you most of what you need to know about Tichuca. It's a rooftop bar with 360-degree views over Bangkok, forest-themed decor that commits harder than it probably should, a second bar at an even higher vantage point, and a tequila list long enough to make the elevator ride down genuinely interesting.

A sprawling food court in the basement of the luxury Central Embassy mall, Eathai rounds up Bangkok's street food classics under one roof and, crucially, one air-conditioning system. The vendors skew regional and traditional, and the prices stay firmly in street-food territory despite the polished surroundings. It draws a lunchtime mix of office workers and tourists who've done the math on heat versus noodles.

Gaeng pa, the bracingly spicy coconut-free jungle curry, is the entire reason this Dusit district restaurant exists, and it shows: the menu runs through a whole roster of variations, from chicken and fish meatball to frog, snail, quail, and wild boar. Stir-fried catfish in chile paste and river snails with green peppercorn round out a meal built for people who find "mild" an insult. End with durian ice cream and sticky rice if that fruit's polarizing perfume is your thing.

Two tables. That's not an oversight, it's the whole point of this supper-club-style Thai restaurant tucked into a residential neighborhood on Bangkok's east side. The chef digs out obscure regional dishes and rotates menus often, so the crowd arriving with printed reservations never quite knows what's coming. The wok-fried smoky cabbage alone explains why people bother figuring out the soi number.

Round marble-top tables, condensed milk in the coffee, and a complimentary cup of Chinese tea that arrives before you ask: Hia Tai Kee has been running this routine for a long time and shows no signs of changing it. It's an old-school Thai-Chinese cafe, the kind where the Chinese Western breakfast, fried eggs and Chinese sausage in a pan, is the obvious move for anyone who shows up hungry.

A rickety shack perched at the edge of the Chao Phraya, with unobstructed river views and no pretense whatsoever. Jack's Bar is the kind of old-school Bangkok drinking spot that makes you wonder how the rest of the city got so serious, serving stiff drinks and kap klaem, the Thai snacks built for sitting around with a beer. The goong cha nam pla, raw shrimp in fish sauce and chiles, has some heat behind it.

The crispy crepes here are made with mung bean flour, which gives them a shell stiff enough to hold their own against the usual limp street-stall versions. This old-school Bangkok street stall does kanom bueang the traditional way, with sweet fillings of egg floss and candied persimmon or savory ones of dried shrimp and makrut lime. There's a row of chairs for the inevitable wait, which tells you everything about the queue.

A century-old rice porridge shop in Chinatown that keeps the lights on until the small hours, mostly for Bangkok's after-hours chef crowd. The setup is blunt and practical: whatever came in fresh that day sits out front, you pick it, you say how you want it cooked. Tea-smoked duck is a fixture. It's a hangover cure you take before the hangover arrives.

Southern Thai cooking sits on the spicier, funkier end of an already bold national cuisine, and this casual spot on the northeastern edge of the city leans into that without apology. Gaeng tai pla, the fermented fish organ curry that separates the curious from the committed, anchors a menu of regional specialties that the kitchen keeps fiercely flavored. A long trip from the center of Bangkok, but the food tastes like it couldn't have been made anywhere closer.

The neighborhood around Sam Yan Market was once famous for seafood restaurants run by Thai Chinese cooks who knew how to steam and stir-fry their way through the freshest local catch. Most of those old names decamped for flashier addresses long ago, but this seafood restaurant stayed, still turning out stir-fried curried crab and tom yum for a crowd that never stopped showing up. The fried rice with Chinese olives, chilies, and cashews is the order regulars protect.

The laminate tables and fluorescent lighting haven't changed in what feels like forever, and neither has the menu at this no-frills Thai canteen on Witthayu Road. Regulars say a generation of Bangkok's celebrated chefs cut their teeth here, which explains a lot about why the green curry and braised pork belly taste the way they do. Come March through May, the khao chae, a chilled summertime rice dish, draws its own devoted following.

A khao gaeng stall that's been around forever, opening before 7:30 a.m. so office workers can load up on curry rice before the day begins. The menu is tight: a few stir-fries, a handful of curries including the hard-to-find cassia leaf curry, and some chile dips. The flashier dishes turn heads, but regulars keep coming back for the salted pork and sweet pork, which says something about the place's priorities.

Absinthe flows freely at this dimly lit, three-floor cocktail bar tucked into a Sathon alley, where exposed brick and contemporary art set a mood somewhere between Paris and a jazz club you weren't supposed to find. There's a rooftop bar for when the nooks and crannies feel too cosy, live jazz on rotation, and signature cocktails alongside French bistro bites. It earned a spot on The 50 Discovery list, which tracks where the scene is heading.

The name above the heavy wooden door tends to raise an eyebrow before you've even ordered, which may be the point. Inside this gin bar on Soi Nana, the whole concept runs in deliberate contrast to Bangkok's endless speakeasy scene: no passwords, no theater, just a serious commitment to gin. The house infusions lean on local ingredients, and the gin and tonics are built with care. Book ahead; it fills up.

A bronze spiral staircase on the 56th floor of a Bangkok skyscraper sets the tone for this cocktail bar, where art deco meets art nouveau and the city sprawls out below in every direction. The drinks program pulls from a 1935 Waldorf cocktail book, so the pours run spirit-forward and serious. The kind of place where the view does half the work, but the bartenders are clearly doing the other half.