The vibe: This could be the quietest kitchen in Bangkok. You’re sitting two-meters away from half a dozen chefs cooking in synchronistic clockwork between whispers. Fingers work in a whirlwind of careful orthodoxy, but not the head chef. Chef Haikal Johari experienced a motorcycle accident in Pattaya in 2015 that left him paralysed; 10 years later he remains a paraplegic who stands through the entire dinner service and explains every dish. He’s the beating heart of this kitchen, and every dish starts and ends with him. 

 

This might be the most organized kitchen in the city. Halfway through your second dessert, you’ll notice the kitchen before you is clean, empty, and ready to do it again. The venue, sitting on the 30th floor of the Kimpton Maa-Lai, overlooks Lumpini Park from the far corner.

 

The food: Given that it’s only eleven seats and the truly minimal amount of PR, the menu has been a big question mark for Bangkok foodies. The tasting menu is currently a hyper-refined French dining experience with Asian touches. 

 

 

“Avant is a French contemporary restaurant with a lot of Asian sensibilities in terms of flavors, in terms of ingredients,” Chef Haikal Johari tells BK. “We are mostly a seafood forward restaurant. Ninety percent of our food is seafood and 90% of our seafood is sourced from Japan.”

 

The menu is a single, small sheet of paper, and you can go ahead and throw that in the trash because it’s about as descriptive a stop sign and the chef will be featuring little treats and explanations in between courses. 

 

 

The meal starts off with a series of single-bite “prelude” canapes, the first being a Norwegian style langoustine with fresh apple with young goat cheese on a meringue, followed by three more running the gamut of very Asian, delicate flavors—think saffron and seaweed. All these dishes are quite time sensitive, so don’t spend too long playing with your camera for Instagram. 

 

The experience starts in earnest with the 36-month comte made into an ice cream, and while it is an unmistakably cheesy dish, there are Asian touches in the form of tofu paired with Singaporean caviar on a base of single origin olive oil. The tokutani tomato brings the flavors back around to Europe, a vitally refreshing dish, before delving more back into Asia with the Amaebi, caviar topped umi. 

 

 

Some dishes were wildly unexpected, such as the “David Herve” oyster and the exceptionally unique seaweed bread, but it was a crab dish not mentioned on the menu that really stood out, a mixture of Tarama crab and local blue swimmer crab wrapped and fried in Japanese glutinous rice with basil puree. 

 

For the seafood lovers, the biggest treat comes in the form of the Samegarei, or rough scaled flounder served with tomatoes and brown butter, the skin on which is impossibly thin and crispy. 

 

After a special treat of a wagyu beef tongue and fried onion, the meal moves onto what is a highlight for many, and one that leans heavily into European flavors, the Lumina lamb from New Zealand, a carefully plated lamb dish in its own sauce with a floret of broccoli. 

 

 

The desserts tend to follow the more Western concepts, in that they’re quite sweet, but a favorite was the Satsuma imo; we won’t get into all the different ingredients, suffice to say that the advice for this sweet potato dish is to dig your spoon all the way to the bottom—a dish that keeps getting sweeter as you go down. The whole shebang ends with four bite-sized mignardises, pastry-like treats, a playful, complex punctuation to the meal. 

 

Why we’d come back: With a few special dishes from the chef, BK’s evening featured a helping of 19 courses. The best reason to go back is because Chef Haikal Johari is unstoppable, inventive, and unpredictable.