What’s new in Bangkok: Restaurants, bars, hotels and more

Travellers have been flooding Bangkok, elevating it into the most visited city on the planet. And it’s not just tourists. International five-star hotel chains, global luxury brands and renowned chefs are jockeying for prime spaces amid the traffic-packed boulevards and soaring skyscrapers of Thailand’s capital, boosting the street-food mecca into a high-end playground.

But Bangkok, which this year is included in The New York Times Travel section’s 52 Places to Go, offers much more than bling. Numerous new independent hangouts — back-alley bars, small hotels, easygoing restaurants — are adding to the city’s cool factor with less fanfare and more street cred. And with an art scene driven by edgy new galleries and museums, the city is rising as a bohemian getaway as well.

HOTELS

You can hardly hurl a pillow menu in Bangkok without hitting a new upscale hotel from Aman, Hilton, Hyatt, Standard or another global-hospitality juggernaut. And this year’s expected new openings — including a Fairmont, a Langham and two Nobus — promise even more spas and welcome drinks.

Bangkok’s most soulful new places to sleep, however, are more confidential. Are you a fan of the HBO series The White Lotus? Motor your boat across the Chao Phraya River to the elegant Siri Sala Private Thai Villa, featured in an episode of the show. (You can also arrive by car.)

Opened in 2022 as a rentable vacation home and events space, this white Mediterranean-style villa reinvented itself last year as a canal-side, five-room boutique hotel, complete with a boat dock, a spa, a garden, a saltwater pool and a chef. Prices for doubles start at 29,425 baht (S$1,161), or about US$908.

Nestled among art galleries and design boutiques in the Talat Noi neighbourhood, the 12-room Blu Dock Restel Bangkok is a husband-and-wife venture where water is a key element. Though the playful space has no actual dock or access to the nearby Chao Phraya, the river’s blue waters and blue-orange tugboats influenced the hotel’s colour scheme and other touches.

“I have loved travelling by boat along the river since childhood,” said Piyanuch Saeju, one of the owners. “We wanted to reflect that feeling in the guest experience.”

Behind a blue door, the lobby is decorated with books, ceramics, porthole-like windows and a five-foot-tall wicker dog statue. Upstairs, airy, uncluttered rooms contain pink marble tables, traditional Chinese wooden doors and maritime-blue curtains. Prices for doubles start at 1,839 baht.

ART

Three years ago, the New York City gallerist Harper Levine visited Bangkok for the first time in decades and was “amazed” by it.

“It was immediately clear the city had remarkable energy and promise,” he said, comparing it to “a younger New York.”

Levine secured a space in Siam Patumwan House, a sleek office tower, for his own gallery, Harper’s Bangkok, which opened on March 30 with a show by the American painter Joel Mesler.

“I expect Bangkok to rise quickly as a serious destination for the art world,” Levine said.

Two new venues are leading that rise. One, Bangkok Kunsthalle, occupies a gutted former printing plant full of raw concrete surfaces and tangled electrical cables.

With guidance from Stefano Rabolli Pansera, a former director of the Hauser & Wirth gallery in London, and a board that includes Jessica Morgan, the director of the Dia Art Foundation, the space hosts both international and Thai artists. Past exhibits have included Yoko Ono’s Mend Piece, a long table piled with ceramic shards that visitors are encouraged to reassemble, and the mystical black-on-white abstract paintings of the Thai-Chinese artist Tang Chang. A sister site, Khao Yai Art Forest, displays avant-garde outdoor works by the French American artist Louise Bourgeois and other artists on 89 acres about three hours by car from Bangkok.

Bangkok’s other new big art museum, Dib Bangkok, opened in December. Kulapat Yantrasast, a Thai architect who has executed projects for the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has transformed a onetime warehouse into a symphony of geometric forms by outfitting the main building with triangular rooftop fins, a conical tower and a tubular turret (which houses a James Turrell exhibition). Large, stone spheres by the Polish artist Alicja Kwade fill the rectangular courtyard.

Until Aug 3 the inaugural exhibition, (In)Visible Presence, showcases works by 40 international artists, including Anselm Kiefer and Bourgeois, and Thai figures like Somboon Hormtientong, whose room of fallen temple columns ranks among the show’s most powerful creations.

RESTAURANTS

Pichaya Soontornyanakij, named the world’s best female chef last year by the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, landed like a meteorite in the Bangkok dining scene in 2021 when she opened Potong in an old Chinatown shop house.

Her newest venture, Khao San Sek, opened last year in a nearby historical townhouse jazzed up with street art and mirrored mosaics. The menu divides dishes into five categories, depending on which “sacred ingredient” of Thai cuisine — rice, coconut, chiles, palm sugar or fish sauce — figures prominently. Recent menu standouts include slow-cooked fatty beef on toasted brioche with spicy satay sauce (220 baht) and coconut ice cream with custard on brioche under a sprinkling of salted egg (250 baht).

Chef Tae, as the 35-year-old Worathon Udomchalotorn is known, could be Bangkok’s next homegrown star. With a background that includes top American restaurants like WD-50 and Benu, he added to 2025’s stellar restaurant crop with Sakkwa, which is practically hidden on the fourth floor of a nondescript building in Talat Noi.

His precisely executed dishes move seamlessly from delicate seafood concoctions (amberjack sashimi in a light, citrusy peanut sauce, 700 baht) to rich recipes that showcase the Thai terroir (yellow curry with cashews, chicken wings and sliced bananas, 450 baht). The gallery-like white room, abstract paintings and jazzy soul music provide a classy backdrop.

Anyone hungry for additional takes on Thai comfort food should beeline to the convivial, wood-lined dining room of Soma. This contemporary-chic new venture counts Chalee Kader (whose Wana Yook restaurant has one Michelin star) among its owners and serves hearty Thai dishes, both reverent and reinterpreted, amid abstract paintings and an electro-rock soundtrack.’

If grilled bee larvae sound too daring, consider the tangy salad with fermented pork and deep-fried rice patties or the loamy mash-up of fried rice, salted mackerel and minced pork in a stone bowl. And you can easily add art to your outing: Levine’s gallery occupies the same building. Dinner for two costs around 2,000 baht.

NIGHTLIFE

Bangkok’s thirst for new rooftop cocktail bars is being slaked these days at Sanctuary, which offers a view of the glimmering Sukhumvit strip — Bangkok’s Broadway — 34 floors below. Relaxing under a cathedral-like canopy made from massive wooden sculptures, you are likely to hear DJs mix Thai Dreamer, a local deep-house favourite. Try the River Prawn Butter cocktail — a combination of the creamy yellow “butter” from shrimp shells (washed with cognac), St Germain liqueur, lime, passion fruit, egg white and tonic (480 baht).

The more remarkable trend is spreading below, as world-class wine bars finally arrive in Bangkok, notably on Sukhumvit’s side streets.

Francophiles should slip into Verlan, a classy, glassy building where a well-heeled crowd chatters in the bar and minimalist dining rooms while sipping some 15 French vintages and enjoying French-Thai dishes and bar snacks.

For a more spirited soiree, Piche is a candlelit, DJ-fuelled, pre-party haven for Bangkok’s gilded youth and young professionals that is also serious about wine. The 10 varieties on tap range from European vintages to a house orange (blended from French pinot gris and pinot blanc), and some lovely surprises lurk in the 150-label cellar, including a merlot aged in amphorae by the Japanese winemaker Grape Republic.

A deeper dive into Bangkok’s fledgling natural-wine scene awaits at Salon Kiku. Anyone who can find the friendly little spot — through a bending alley, into an undistinguished building and up three flights of stairs — deserves a drink. Fortunately, the bar, where DJs spin vinyl albums, serves plenty. Eastern European macerated wines? Yes. Cult Western European varietals? In abundance. Hard-to-find Japanese bottles? Absolutely.

By Seth Sherwood © The New York Times.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.