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Rude Travel by Vir Sanghvi: A streaming success
It’s more expensive, more crowded now. But Thailand has upped its game. Along Bangkok’s Chao Phraya, new delights await and good food is getting its starry due
Sometimes, I think of the rupee as an old friend you could once count on, but who has now fallen on such hard times that you wonder if there is any recovery in sight. When I first started going to Bangkok in the late 1980s, the rupee was worth nearly two Thai baht. This made Bangkok incredible value, and hotels and restaurants seemed ridiculously inexpensive. Since then, alas, the rupee has slipped into terminal decline, and when I visited last week, I realised to my horror that you now need nearly three rupees to buy a single baht.
This has deterred some visitors. Vietnam, which is much cheaper, has become a new favourite for Indians, and good hotels in Malaysia are cheaper and better value than their counterparts in Thailand.
It hasn’t affected the Thais, of course. The world is rushing to Thailand, and every winter brings the same kind of crowds. Hotels up their rates and immigration queues at Bangkok’s Suvarnbhumi airport are so long that they spill out of the arrivals hall and into the corridors. Tourism is at such high levels that the Tourism Authority of Thailand, which once used to encourage Indians to visit, now sits back and does very little; because it doesn’t need to. Flights and hotels are full, anyway.
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One consequence of the boom is that more and more deluxe hotels keep opening in Thailand. Many of them are excellent but I tend to stick to my old favourites. The Four Seasons was the first luxury chain to take Thailand seriously. Thirty years ago, when hardly anyone bothered with the northern city of Chiang Mai, the Four Seasons built one of the world’s most influential hotels, with a rice farm next to the lobby, there. A resort property in Koh Samui opened in 2007, putting the town on the luxury map. It’s a measure of how timeless those hotels were (partly because of the genius of the architect, Bill Bensley) that, a couple of years ago, when the makers of The White Lotus scoured Asia looking for a location that exuded luxury, they settled on the Four Seasons Samui because in the years since it opened, nobody has managed to build as spectacular a property.
I ended up staying at the Four Seasons in Bangkok by a twist of fate. The company bought the Regent chain, so the Bangkok Regent where I would stay, turned into the Four Seasons, Bangkok. It became my home in Thailand because it combined the ambience of the Regent with the service that has made the Four Seasons globally famous.
Then, a few years ago, the Four Seasons gave up the hotel (it is now the Anantara Siam) and said it would open a new property on the banks of the Chao Phraya river. I was, frankly, somewhat sceptical, because the riverside area is a little far from central Bangkok, and I liked the idea of being in the centre and walking everywhere.
But of course I was wrong. The new Four Seasons is a little further away from the old riverside hotels and has expanded the experience of the Chao Phraya and become one of the hottest hotels in town. I have stayed there several times now and it has had the curious effect of making me look at Bangkok differently after all these years. I think I now prefer the calm of the riverside to the madness of Ploenchit and central Bangkok with the endless traffic jams.
I may not be the only one to have come to this conclusion. The riverside is now the luxury destination in Bangkok (as hotel rates demonstrate). And there is one advantage: Among the most alienating characteristics of hotels in South East Asia is that every other guest is also a foreigner. The only locals you meet are hotel staff. The new Four Seasons is an exception. The restaurants are full of Thais and the banquet rooms are booked solid with Thai weddings and parties. The Thai guests are young and trendy, and I suspect they may be the children of the people who used to frequent the old Four Seasons.
Even for Bangkok regulars like me, it’s a novel experience: A different part of town, a sense of being outside tourist Bangkok and of course, that Four Seasons service.
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There is still magic by the river. The Four Seasons does a lot to encourage Bangkok’s creative and artistic community. One of its initiatives is a small annual concert by young Thai musicians who have Western classical music backgrounds, and play interesting arrangements of pop hits as a break from their more serious repertoire.
The concert is held in the hotel’s outdoor courtyard, with the Chao Phraya as the backdrop. I was lucky enough to be there for this year’s performance. But even as I was trying to identify one particularly haunting tune (it turned out to be Adele’s Someone Like You, arranged for strings) the sky over the river suddenly exploded with a spectacular fireworks display. It seemed rude to ignore the musicians, but even they stopped playing and looked upwards as the display became longer and more extravagant, completely colonising the night sky.
It was a moment of pure magic and I don’t think it was planned by the hotel (the fireworks were probably part of some other celebration by the river). But the fact that it was so unexpected made it more special. And it helped me understand why Thais love the Chao Phraya.
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There has always been great food in Bangkok but it’s good to see the city’s chefs now getting global recognition. I have known the Suhrings, identical German twins, since 2008. They were the chefs at Mezzaluna at the Lebua hotel and I believed they were underrated, writing here all those years ago that their food deserved two Michelin stars.
One day, the twins gave up their secure jobs and put all their savings into building their own restaurant. Halfway through that process, they realised that they had already spent all their money and the restaurant was still far from finished. They turned to their friend Gaggan Anand, who agreed at once to put up the rest of the money. The restaurant eventually opened to great acclaim and won a Michelin star.
That should have been a happy ending, but the Suhrings were not done yet. They worked with an almost fanatical zeal to improve their food. Michelin noticed and gave them two stars. They worked even harder.
Then, a few weeks ago, they went up the stage at the Michelin Thailand ceremony to get their two stars again. That was when Michelin played a trick on them. They were asked to look at the screen behind them which suddenly flashed that their restaurant had won three stars.
They were startled, overjoyed and emotional. Asked to say a few words, they said they wanted to thank Gaggan Anand, without whom there would never have been a Suhring restaurant. In his seat in the auditorium, Gaggan who is normally as unemotional as the Suhrings, felt the tears streaming down his cheeks.
Now, that’s what I call a happy ending. Or a great new beginning.
From HT Brunch, December 27, 2025
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