BKK

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2 Duke St Windsor, VIC 3181

My score: 3.5/5

What’s the sound of Thai food? If you’re at BKK, the easygoing bar/restaurant off Chapel Street, it’s the crunch of betel leaves, herbs and peanuts, the clack of chopsticks as you try (and, if you’re me, fail) to pick up slippery rice noodles and the preoccupied “mmm-mh” when someone asks you if the food is tasty. The background soundtrack is the rat-a-tat-tat of the cocktail shaker and the huzza-huzza of gleeful chats, the prestissimo percussion of a place that loves to party.

BKK (it’s the airline code for Bangkok) has landed where Saigon Sally once strutted and has the same owners, the Commune Group who also have Neptune, Tokyo Tina and Hanoi Hannah clustered around Chapel Street (Hanoi Hannah also hangs in Elsternwick). The restaurants are light-hearted places, big on vibes, small on culinary constraints. If you visited Saigon Sally, you’ll remember the central bar which still dominates this room; the backlit glass bricks are new, casting a rosy sheen.

Chef Sean Judd first cooked Thai food at Nahm in London way back in 2002 and he’s continued on that path with stints at Longrain, Chin Chin and St Kilda’s St Hotel when Thai was its focus and it had the same owners as BKK. Here, his food is relaxed, served in colourful melamine bowls, ticking off the Thai sour, spicy, salty, sweet checkbox without getting too pungent or sweat-inducing. BKK isn’t OTT.

Smoked trout is flaked, mixed with pomelo (a grapefruit-like citrus), ginger and toasted coconut then piled in a bowl. Diners scoop it onto deep-green betel leaves and munch away: texture comes first and flavour zooms along next.

Coconut-marinated chicken is shredded and tumbled with peanuts, strips of green mango, prawns, fresh chilli and coriander. It’s all juice, crunch, succulence and summer.

Other easy snacks include the fried chicken wings – probably compulsory – puddling in a sweet-salt fish sauce, and the pork skewers, caramelised to the nth degree thanks to a rich condensed milk glaze, pulled back to savoury with soy and white pepper. They’re great – they’re also permission to have another cocktail.

Speaking of which, the cocktails are designed with food in mind, citrus forward and not overly boozy, and prepared with careful intensity. Try the Boarding Pass with vodka, fig liqueur, watermelon and yuzu (a Japanese citrus). Beer and bubbles work too, especially for Sunday’s bottomless brunch – the food and the drinks roll for two hours ($69).

Larger dishes mean less fighting over the last skewer. Sour orange curry – soupy, zingy, touched by tamarind – is studded with quail, astringent Thai eggplant and long, lovely snake beans. It’s great with sticky rice, which comes in small plastic pouches (you see it like this in Thailand but I don’t love it).

Rolled rice noodles are hard to share for two reasons. One, they’re so good you’ll covet them, silky and soy-tickled, nestled among pieces of golden omelette and crunchy greens. Two, they’re really hard to pick up.

Chopstick clangers are actually the hardest thing about BKK, which is all about letting good times roll, free of attitude and complication, full of vim and happy hullabaloo.

See their website.

First published in Good Food, 13th January 2018.