THERE is no competition. In the prize for the country's most lurid restaurant interior, the Bangkok Cafe wins hands down. This little room, at the hard-nosed end of Parnell Street, where the only culinary competition comes in the shape of Benny's (excellent) chipper a few hundred yards along towards the ILAC centre, is where Mo Hennessy and her team have fashioned a fascinating little Thai restaurant at an expense, I would estimate, of fully £100, maybe £150.
There hasn't been such an immaculate pauvre bedsit style created in Dublin in the last decade, so fashion freaks who are grossed out on beech and stainless steel and chrome will swoon at the Bangkok Cafe's total and utter disregard of contemporary style. Here is a room dragged from the student quarters of universities in Belfast or Berkeley or Manchester or Dublin from any time between 1969 and 1975. Cheap prints, paper tablecloths, Buddhist icons. All that is missing is some burning incense, a waiter who greets you with, "Hi, man" and Joni Mitchell on the soundtrack.
That is all that is missing in Mo's restaurant, however. As a simple place to eat, the Bangkok is bang on the money, with tasty food, good service, and, amid all this inelegant retro-style, an incredibly slick clientele - this place is ultra fashionable. The Bangkok reminds us what restaurants often forget: that what they are actually all about is providing decent food at decent prices in a good room with friendly service. The Bangkok gives you these fundamental things, and plays pretty hip jazz while it goes about it.
The menu is long, the wine list is short - comprising about half a dozen bottles and no more, which is enough to be going on with, particularly if you order something as decent as the McGuigan Semillon-Chardonnay.
The menu offers lots of starters, but our excellent waiter informed us that the intriguing "Lamb on Toast" (marinated minced lamb on a bed of sliced pan and deep fried with cucumber relish) was not available: quite a disappointment as it is the most quixotic thing on offer, raising interesting culinary questions which one would love to have solved. But it will have to wait for another visit, so we chose coriander soup, and winter prawns.
The soup was served in a carved tin bowl (the same bowls are also used for the rice servings) and it was a sheer thrill. Marinated shrimp were encased in won ton wrappers and they floated around in a dark, clear broth which was invigoratingly, intensely flavoured, a cracking starter. The winter prawns were five Thai prawns wrapped in filo and deep-fried, with an sharp chilli sauce for dipping, and again they were very precisely executed.
Main courses comprise green and red curries with various principal ingredients, then a range of stir-fried dishes, and some rice dishes. I ordered a red curry with beef, onion, red pepper and lime leaves, my companion the special Thai fried rice, a plate of well-cooked rice with prawns, crab meat, cashew-nuts, raisins and pineapple.
This last ingredient made me wary of the dish, suggesting as it does abominations such as Hawaiian pizza, but in the context of the complete dish, the pieces of pineapple were quite suitable. Best of all, the dish was not a mish-mash of ingredients, but was both well composed and well-seasoned, a very interesting variant on a pilaf, which benefited from being very light thanks to the fairly short-grained Thai rice used.
My own red curry was served in the equivalent of a 1986 Roches Stores dinner service soup bowl, (wholly appropriate in the circumstances, I thought) with a plate underneath to spoon the curry and the rice out onto. It was a lovely, simple, flavoursome dish, the beef in thin slices, with red onion and red pepper still slightly crisp, and snaky bamboo shoots weaving their way through a coconutty sauce. It was fun to eat, the spicing well judged (the Bangkok would appear to stay clear of the incendiary spicing which some Thai food embraces), and best of all it was the right sort of food in the right sort of room at the right sort of price, a paltry £6.95.
This mix of food, price and ambience is what makes the Bangkok work. If it wasn't modestly and amiably done, then you might notice that every time the waiter opened the large Coke cooler, which was beside us, to fetch a bottle of wine or some water, then your legs get an icy chill. You might pass a remark on the fact that the only hand towels are kitchen paper, or the fact that the room seems almost to be a compulsory smoking zone, or that the desserts are damn near a no-go area.
But they do everything so sincerely, and with such unpretentious grace, that all these things are, therefore, irrelevant. In fact, paradoxically, they seem like assets: "Reasons to like the Bangkok Cafe, Part 1". But perhaps their greatest asset, their sense of humour, is best explained by the following story, told to me by a friend who visited the Bangkok shortly after it opened.
Back then, they used to leave the door open so people could just walk into the room. One night, as service was merrily buzzing about its business, a youngster walked in, and quickly raised a hand which held a plastic water bomb, and which was threatening to give all the punters a good soaking.
Quick as a flash, the waiter pounced over to the door, grabbed the kid and his intended missile, and bundled water and waif out the door at lightning speed. As he came back into the room, to the sound of admiring applause from everyone in the restaurant, he calmly said, "Don't worry everyone, that was just the food critic from The Irish Times."
I'm afraid it's bouquets rather than water bombs this time out, Mo.
The Bangkok Cafe, 106 Parnell Street, Dublin 1 tel: 01 878 6618 Open 5.30 p.m.- 10.30 p.m. Mon-Sun. No credit cards.