Issue07 : 07 July 2014

Red curry, a Northern Thai dish prepared unexpectedly.

While many Thai SELECT awarded restaurants earn their stars from making traditional Thai cuisine, Sra Bua by Kiin Kiin takes everything you thought you knew about Thai cooking and turns it on its head.

When the Siam Kempinski was looking to create a novel and new restaurant for the hotel in 2009, they hired Danish chef Henrik Yde-Andersen as a consultant and conceptual chef. Yde-Andersen had fallen in love with Thai cuisine while travelling in the country, and ended up staying and working for several years, learning the range and richness of Thai cuisine. Upon returning to Denmark, he founded Kiin Kiin restaurant in Copenhagen, which served Thai food with techniques from molecular gastronomy and other creative twists.

Sra Bua by Kiin Kiin continued in this tradition, and while it took some time for Thai diners to come to turns with such a varied presentation of local food, the restaurant is now going strong and has just launched a new menu.

Chef Henrik Yde-Andersen, who came from Denmark for his love of Thai food..

Yde-Andersen laughs about the early days at Kiin Kiin. “A lot of people were shocked,” he says. “We told them it wasn’t going to be like mum’s home cooking, but they still were pretty flabbergasted. Fortunately, we stayed true to the most important thing in the cuisine, that of keeping traditional flavours preserved.”

Sra Bua is all about the flavours. Forget about recognising the dishes. Yde-Andersen’s signature dish, a red curry with lobster salad, involves a top plate serving the curry – which is frozen – lobster and litchi foam, while a bottom plate filled with smoky nitro keeps the consistency of the curry.

Atmosphere in Sra Bua, which means lotus pond

My tasting menu came with six main dishes and countless appetisers to start. It featured a frozen tom kha chicken and galangal soup with pickled citrus where the tom kha was served as a powder, as well as a tom yum with prawn noodles in which the soup base was served hot, but the galangal, lemongrass, tamarind and other spices were served cold in a foam and powder concoction. It was the most exquisite tom yum I have ever tasted with each flavour bursting forth separately and yet perfectly combined.

Yde-Andersen’s take on the nam prik noom green chilli dip and his own version of the northern sai oua sausage were beyond sublime. Once again all the flavours and spices that are the quintessential of Thai cooking, came together perfectly, yet each was accented first alone. It was as if someone had mixed up the perfect elixir of all of the best tastes of Thai cuisine.

If you have any preconceived notions about Thai cooking, you owe it to yourself to try a dinner at Sra Bua, if only just to sit and marvel at what a little ingenuity and creativity can do to a cuisine that is already one of the world’s best. “When we started, we just wanted to make people here be really proud of their food,” says Yde-Andersen. “Instead of needing to go to a French or Italian restaurant for a fine or special evening out, why not make it Thai.” Sra Bua is certainly making people pay attention.

Sra Bua by Kiin Kiin, Siam Kempinski Hotel
991/9 Rama I Road (behind Siam Paragon)
Tel. + 66 (0)2 162 9000
www.kempinskibangkok.com/sra-bua-by-kiin-kiin

Words and Photos by Dave Stamboulis.

Thai Select

Sra Bua by Kiin  Kiin is endorsed by the DITP under its Thai Select scheme. The Thai SELECT programme was launched to certify and promote authentic Thai cuisine around the world. It is a seal of approval granted to Thai restaurants – both overseas and local Thai eateries that serve authentic food – and processed Thai food products. The objective is to increase the recognition of quality Thai restaurants and processed Thai food products as well as to encourage Thai restaurateurs and food producers to raise quality while maintaining authenticity. For more details of the scheme visit: http://www.thaiselect.com.