Soul Food Mahakorn

Colin is back from his trip to the US and I am back from our trip to Vietnam and Cambodia so we met for dinner this past Tuesday night. Went to a new place in Thong Lor – “Soul Food Mahakorn.” It is run by an American who used to be a food writer but now has opened his own restaurant. Three floors – a bar and a few tables on the first floor, the main dining room on the second floor, and the kitchen on the third floor. No dumbwaiter so the staff spends a lot of time and energy carrying plates up and down the stairs. Cool space – narrow and industrial, with grey walls and floor that look like concrete but are actually treated wood. (We talked to the owner – Jarrett – so we got some details. Turns out that he’s from Allentown, PA.)

The food is mostly northern Thai, with some American variations thrown in to keep it interesting. Colin and I split a few dishes – chicken with banana flowers, Chiang Mai sausage, and a beef curry dish. The curry dish was good but different – because it was northern Thai, it didn’t have coconut milk in it so it was almost like a broth. But the best dish we ordered was red curry chicken over waffles. That one was really tasty – should have ordered two of those.

We were ready to leave around 9:00 but just then it started to rain – a real tropical downpour. It used to rain like that every afternoon here August through September, but it hadn’t rained at all for the past month. So, neither one of us had an umbrella. We waited it out for a bit but it didn’t seem like it was going to stop anytime soon. So, we made a run for the Thong Lor Skytrain stop. Got soaked but at least it was a warm rain.

One odd thing – people in Bangkok seem to go out to dinner late. There were a few people at the bar and one group at a table when we got there at 7:00 PM. But it really didn’t get busy until later, with most people showing up for dinner around 8:30 or so. Seems kind of late, especially for a Tuesday night. Maybe it’s a carryover from when there wasn’t air conditioning so you needed to wait until it was little cooler?