There are restaurants that feed you lunch and there are restaurants that give you a story. Ms. Maria & Mr. Singh, perched above Michelin-starred Gaggan on Sukhumvit 31, ticks off both. With a fistful of lime, a cheeky puff of tamarind, the concept tells the fictional story of a love affair between a Mexican girl and an Indian boy. The team defines it as fantasy cuisine, and the food does exactly what the phrase promises: it invents joy.
If you’ve eaten at Gaggan downstairs, expect a different mood upstairs. This Bangkok-based restaurant trades the down-to-the-second theatre of tasting menus for a more elastic and buttoned-down ride. Think of it as an accessible love letter to two cuisines that rarely meet but somehow speak the same spicy, celebratory language.
Tiles and textiles in sunburst orange and cobalt blue, a neon skeleton sitting on the edge of the pass, mismatched plates that add to the room’s playful mise-en-scène. This is less of a sacred fine dining and more of a convivial family-style dine where the food is a riff rather than a literal mash-up, the wine and cocktail lists lean natural and generous.
We start with the very-addictive Papdi Chaat with a yoghurt sphere bursting with a sweet and spicy tamarind acidity, Pani Puri with a chewy tortilla encasing herbaceous tamarind water, and a Pork Vindaloo Taco with homemade flour tortillas and chargrilled pineapple. The Aguachile Verde salad with fennel, radicchio, green apple, fig leaf oil, chilli, mint, and lime is the zesty wonder we’d love to eat all summer. The Ceviche flirts with spiced coconut milk, the highly recommended Gaggan’s Crab Curry with Poee vanishes before you can say arriba!, and Crispy Churros with saffron cardamom syrup and pistachio cream, which is apparently Mukesh Ambani’s darling favourite. Triple hurrah for the Leche Flan that deserves to be ordered, irrespective of how many buttons from your trousers have popped open.
Special props to the service team whose enthusiasm and charm chirps up the mood and, might we say, make the food taste better. It’s the kind of hospitality that feels like being invited to a friend’s house who happens to have impeccable taste in mezcal and masala.
Our advice for the local or travelling diner: go hungry and plan for sharing. Dishes arrive in waves, and the hurrahs are often in cross-cultural culinary collisions. The setting suits everything from messy catch-ups (our rascal table) to birthday meals (we sang along). The misses, like the Palak Avocado, are expected and part and parcel of the fusion risk-reward. The hits adeptly flirt with novelty and culinary depth. Expect a moderate to lively ambience across tables who like to argue about whether a dish is more Mexican or more Indian (the correct answer: both).
Head to: 68 Sukhumvit 31, Bangkok, Thailand 10110
