Bangkok Diners Club
Ian Jones, Food and Drink Editor
Bangkok Diner’s Club could well be the most eagerly anticipated restaurant of the year. It’s the new project from the team behind District, CT’s favourite restaurant of the past decade (sorry Mana, sorry Skof, sorry New York Krispy Fried Chicken).
Quick recap: District opened in 2020 as a futurist fine dining Thai restaurant showcasing inventive Southeast Asian-inspired dishes, matched with never-before-seen Bladerunner-style design features. As we effused at the time, it was the perfect restaurant for modern Manchester: original, exciting and effortlessly brilliant, zero misfires.
Unfortunately, lockdown scuppered things, sending the team (chef Ben Humphreys and his wife Bo, and business partner Danny Collins) back to the drawing board. Bangkok Diners Club is their long-awaited return to the North-West food scene, taking inspiration from Bo’s upbringing in both Bangkok and the Isan region from Thailand.
It’s held in one of Ancoats’ most elegant dining spaces, upstairs at the Edinburgh Castle on Cutting Room Square. The dozen-course tasting menu has been replaced by a series of snacks and sharing plates, small and large. This makes it accessible in all the best ways – pop in for a quick dish or two, or bring a group of friends and harvest the lot.
The menu is a miracle of big flavours and impossibly fine details. The simplest item would be the onion rings, but even these are ridiculously well-crafted – think pickled onion Monster Munch put through a Jetsons-style supercomputer.
The seasoning is eye-wateringly potent, the batter is paper-thin, and the thick twirls of onion are hot and delicious. Britain’s best pub snack 2055, mark my words.
Then there’s the ex-dairy beef nam tok salad: thick slices of soft, tender steak, tossed in leaves and the kind of unusual-but-familiar seasoning that Humphreys does so well. By itself, this is a true treat, a masterpiece of flavours and texture, but it comes with a little pot of bone marrow aioli – mix this all together and magic happens.
This is the kitchen crew’s genius at play – these dishes aren’t another well-worn case of a chef going on holiday and nicking ideas verbatim. The team merge flavours and wide-ranging concepts, then takes them to places few would think of. On paper, some of these ideas shouldn’t work, but all do.
Case in point, probably the best dish on the menu and our personal favourite of the year: roast pork belly phat pet with rhubarb. Phat pet essentially means spicy stir fry, but, in this case, that’s like calling the Bayeux Tapestry some nice knitting.
The hunks of pork are things of beauty – thick, juicy slabs, topped off with crunchy, salty crackling – while the sauce ticks every box on the taste front: sweet, savoury, and spicy; elevated by the tang of the rhubarb. It’s one of the most exciting and original dishes we’ve tried since, well, District.
There are other sublime dishes on the menu, but we’ll leave some surprises for you to uncover.
Ultimately, Bangkok Diners Club is exactly what Manchester’s food scene needs right now. It takes a certain madcap brain to come up with dishes like this – you won’t find many rhubarb curries in Thailand – and it’s a true joy to see them executed so well.
