One evening several weeks ago my friend and I were hanging around the Bugis area.
It was dinner time.
But because we hadn't much of an idea where we ought to go or what we wanted to eat, we decided to just walk around and see where our feet led us to.
How it was we ended up outside BKK Bistro & Bar at the ground floor of the National Library, I don't know, but we did.
And we went in.
BKK Bistro & Bar is a relatively new place.
When I say it's new, I really mean that it's new.
Not only was the bistro not here before, even the space that they currently occupy is new.
National Library built the space up from scratch, made it alfresco, and that's where we have this bistro and bar today.
One thing that attracts me about this place is the synthwave lights they've chosen. There's a bit of neon pink, a bit of neon green, and a bit of neon yellow. It stands out like a sort of bling lighthouse amidst the huge cavern of an empty space that is the building's ground floor.
Best part, it draws your eye.
Literally.
Perhaps that was what attracted us this particular evening.
BKK Bistro & Bar serves up a good selection of beers and wines, but they're not any less when it comes to their food menu.
A popular favorite are the Boat Noodles, of which you get a choice between Glass Noodle or Rice Noodle, a choice between Red Tom Yum or Herb Boat Noodle Soup, and a plethora of toppings that include beef balls, beef slices, prawns, pork balls, pork livers, and pork slices.
Another favorite would be their Mookata which not only includes the popular meats of beef, pork and chicken, there's also Taiwan sausage, smoked duck breast and luncheon meat. With it being Mookata, there's the moat, and of course there will be the hotpot ingredients that name cheese tofu, egg tofu, cuttlefish balls, chicken cheese balls, lobster balls, and Teochew meat balls amongst the like.
One thing that they offer for the Mookata grill is seafood, to the tune of fish slices, prawns, crayfish, mussels and clam lala.
It will be another time that we'll have their Mookata.
This evening the appetite was more for the boat noodles, and that's what we decided to have.
Between the two of us, we chose two bowls each, one of the Red Tom Yum, one of the Herb Boat Noodle Soup.
Beef balls and beef slices were our meat of choice, and let's just say I went ballistic adding in the extras of pork lard and garlic in oil from the containers on our table.
I liked the herb soup- it reminded me very much of the one I ate at Ploenchit, but clearer, and lighter- and even though the tom yum soup looked really red when it arrived at our table, to my surprise, it wasn't as spicy as I imagined it to be.
It did whet the appetite the way tom yum always does, though, and made me wish we had stomach space for more.
There're a few interesting dishes to be had here at this bistro, amongst which, there was the tom yum seafood claypot, the tom yum seafood soup, grilled chicken, and the lala series covering both traditional claypot lala and lala tom yum pot.
Of course there were the staple of rice dishes- the basil sliced beef rice, the pineapple fried rice, the crispy pork belly rice, the green curry sliced pork rice.
What we took this evening was a plate of Salted Egg Fried Chicken.
And may I just say that it exceeded my expectations?
I had thought it would be like some of those we find at zichar stalls- bits of popcorn chicken laden with pale yellow salted egg gravy.
But, no, this was different.
Crunchy and crispy with an even distribution of salted egg sauce over each piece, it was the kind of chicken that had the sauce bursting in your mouth every time you took a bite, yet not drowned in it so much that the sauce dripped off your chopsticks when you picked it up.
This was no messy dish.
With each crisp bite of chicken, I found myself relishing in the distinctive taste and creamy texture of the salted egg sauce.
What's more, the chicken meat wasn't tough.
And I loved the bright, cheery, cheerful color.
I only wish I could have had more of the sauce.
So good was it that I would've been happy to eat the sauce plain on its own.
There'll be some dishes that I'll want to try the next time I come.
Like the Thai Issan Pork Sausage that they have with glutinous rice.
And there's this pasta dish I saw the table next to us having.
Then there are the desserts- the Rainbow Sticky Rice Ball with Mango Slice, the Mini Fried Dough with Kaya and Sweetened Milk, and the Gula Melaka Filled Mochi with Coconut Ice Cream.
Also, if I can, a Chorong Chorong Soju Lychee Yakult Tower.
I wonder if they have it in glass size...