This review took place in April 2019 and is based on a visit to the restaurant without the restaurant's knowledge. For more on BK's review policy, click here.

Let’s get this out of the way right now. B400 is an insane price to pay for an avocado sandwich. It’s the price of 10 street-side pad kapraos. It’s 10 percent of the monthly rent at our old Victory Monument apartment. It’s the price of one cocktail in… alright maybe that’s not the best example.

But if B400 avocado sandwiches have a place in your heart, then take it from us: there’s none we’d rather eat than this Bangladesh-born bakery’s oozing treat of toasty brown bread and citrusy, creamy guacamole. It’s redemption for every time in Bangkok you’ve been served a schmear of green paste on a hunk of ciabatta that should’ve been thrown to the ducks yesterday. It’s an avocado sandwich that doesn’t make you get your phone out, google avo’ sandwiches in Melbourne and say, why can’t Bangkok do that?

If you’re not into avocado, there are other ways to spend your money here. How about a B2,000 whole cheesecake, or maybe a B400 heirloom tomato salad? Coming to Holey can sting, but that’s because they do the job properly. Those heirloom tomatoes will be little bursts of piquant field freshness, while the olive oil (Spanish, extra virgin, early harvest) is good enough to drink.

Bread is where the place really shines, thanks to owner Alam Porag’s fanatical approach to baking. He has the unbleached flour milled to specific requirements that we’re told give his sourdough that perfectly aerated interior and chewy-in-a-good-way crust. All we know is it works.

We also have a few workarounds for the worst of the prices. Tip no. 1: a heftily portioned B300 bowl of pork and beef meatballs swimming in tangy stewed tomatoes, drizzles of good oil and a fistful of cheese—good enough to share. Tips no. 2 and 3: the B120 English sausage rolls (a flaky orgy of juicy meat and buttery pastry) and an entire caramel drizzle cake that’s a mere snip at B200.

In fact the glass display cabinet is an array of affordable treats, from frosted Berliners (B75) to Latin beef puffs (B100) to triple chocolate cookies (B40). They all taste superb. You enjoy all this amid Ibiza lounge music and new-age wooden light sculptures alongside 30 somethings with Havaianas and MacBooks. The coffee’s decent if not groundbreaking, and they even have some good wines (ask for what’s available).

Holey, then, is a bourgeois Bangkok bakery where you get what you pay for. And how rare is that?