Beach Road/Second Road
(between Soi 6/1 and Central Road)
Pattaya

The Hard Rock Hotel is one of Pattaya’s most upmarket hotels. Situated between Beach Road and Second Road, not far north of Pattaya Central Road, it’s convenient for all Pattaya’s nightlife and attractions.

The hotel’s foyer is worth a visit even if only to look at the displays there. They have a host of pop memorabilia, from Elton John’s platform-soled boots (funny how small his feet are) to Gerri Halliwell’s purple dress!

There are several restaurants and bars at the hotel, and of course a Hard Rock Café on Beach Road. Here’s our review of the Starz Diner Restaurant.

An advert in the local paper announced that Starz had started a nightly buffet and as an introductory offer (June 2006) you could go and eat all you like for THB 550. We thought we’d give it a go.

We chose to eat outside rather than inside the air-conditioned restaurant. We were given a table by the pool - the most beautiful swimming pool we’ve ever seen - and the ambience was lovely. It was comfortable, relaxing, and the service was friendly and efficient (but not over-attentive, which really irks us). Really, it was perfect and I couldn’t criticise anything.

The food was pretty good. All top notch stuff. To be fair, we’ve been to buffets here where there is a wider choice, but what was on offer was really very good – salads, soups, main courses, barbecue (including seafood), and desserts. Very nice indeed. We agreed that we’d definitely go back (depending on how much it costs after the introductory offer period).

A big bonus that we hadn’t expected was that after we’d ordered two glasses of wine (at THB 240 – ouch!), the waitress brought the bottle to our table and said, “I’ll give you the bottle.” Nice, we thought. We didn’t realise that she actually meant she would give us the whole bottle for free and we didn’t even have to pay for the two glasses we thought we’d bought!

Thus we had a lovely evening out with great food and a bottle of wine for less than £20. We were as happy as Larry (whoever he is).

This place gets a big thumbs up from us.

Rating 4 out of 5. (Nowhere is perfect – well, not yet, anyway). Oh yes, on that point, I did note that the ladies’ toilets were a bit below par although Mr ND says that the men’s were perfectly OK. So there you go; maybe I went in at a bad time or something.

Update (July 2008):

We’ve been back a couple of times since, and it’s still consistently good; nice food, and excellent service. Admittedly the price has gone up; it’s now THB 874 (exchange rate as at 31 July 2008: £1 = THB 66.4) on all nights except Saturdays, when the price goes up to THB 1,000. On the other hand, they offer what they call free-flow service of beer, white wine and red wine (as much as you can drink, and they don’t stint in their service), so it’s still very good value for money.

By the way, we also decided to have a look at the rooms while we were there. They’re designed around a modern Zen style with oversized bed heads featuring famous rock-’n'-roll personalities. In-room facilities include wall-mounted TV, mini CD player, mini bar, tea and coffee making facilities, feather duvets and pillows. Kings Club rooms have their own separate floors with private access, one-time laundry and pressing for eight items, breakfast and evening cocktails and high speed Internet access in the Club lounge.

The rooms are small, but so well appointed that you couldn’t fail to be comfortable here.

The hotel has many other facilities: gym and spa, climbing wall, kids’ club, general store, and of course that fabulous swimming pool…

Ambassador Hotel
171 Soi 11 Sukhumvit Road
Bangkok 10110

Several years ago when we were relatively new to Bangkok we used to enjoy visiting the Ambassador Hotel’s buffet lunch on Bangkapi Terrace – you could have all you could eat of a wide choice of Japanese, Thai, Chinese and Western food for less than 500 baht, which in those days was a little over a tenner. Not only that, but they had a pretty good live band which did quite accurate renditions of current pop and rock hits, including “Zombie” by the Cranberries – although like most Thai bands they did tend to overdo the Eagles a lot.

The Ambassador’s undergone a lot of changes in the meantime, and the buffet got moved first into a new block (where nothing else ever seemed to be moving in) and then into a funny little lower-ground floor area in the main hotel building itself. We’d also discovered alternative lunch places, including FoodLoft, the food court at the top of department store chain Central’s Chidlom branch, so for many years we forgot about the Ambassador buffet.

[We also weren't terribly impressed with the hotel itself. While living in Delhi we tried booking to stay there a few times on our visits to Bangkok, but got fed up with arriving at six in the morning (because of the flight schedules) only to be asked to wait for a couple of hours while they made up the room for us. In the end we decided to book (and pay for) the room from noon the previous day to ensure it would definitely be free for us... only to be asked yet again to wait for it to be made up. Being ripped off like that was the final straw, and we've never stayed there since.]

Then on a visit to Bangkok in July 2008, on a whim we decided we’d give the buffet another go – if it still existed. A quick search in the main building revealed it to be in a place called Am Café, which turned out to be the funny little lower-ground place we remembered. However, it was only near the entrance that you had to be careful to duck your head. A friendly staff member asked us where we would like to sit. After first doing a quick scan of what was on offer, and finding that there was enough choice for us to have an enjoyable meal, we chose a table for two towards the back of the restaurant, near the window.

Once our beers had arrived, we went to have a closer look at the buffet in detail. The choice on offer was pretty similar to what it had been in the early ’90s – it’s still Thai, Japanese, Chinese and Western.

Japanese

There wasn’t a great deal of choice of sushi available, and the rice turned out to be over-soggy. But the sashimi display had both of our favourites: salmon and tuna – as well as the ubiquitous crab sticks.

As far as the hot dishes were concerned, the tempura wasn’t. It’s a real pity that so many buffet restaurants make the mistake of putting tempura out ready-made. By all means cook some for display purposes – and make sure that it clearly is for display only – but it really does need to be eaten freshly cooked if the batter’s not to be greasy and soggy. The miso soup was very good, though.

Chinese

Neither of us is that big on Chinese food, but Mr ND did sample some of the char siu pork. It was tasty, with just a hint of crispiness on the outside; very nice!

Thai

You’d expect the Thai food to be done well, and it was. We tried some of the duck green curry, the barbecue pork curry, and pork with ginger. All of them were full of flavour and well prepared. However, we stopped short of the boiled egg and intestine soup with soy sauce!

I decided to ask for some som tam, the famous green papaya salad from the Isaan region (north-east Thailand). There was much hilarity all round when I asked for it phet phet (very spicy) – we’re still not sure whether it was the fact that I used the Thai term, or whether they were tickled by the novelty of a farang asking for spicy food. In the event they overdid it with the chillis, so Mr ND asked for one made merely phet (spicy) and we swapped.

Western

We had a look at the Western station out of interest, but were a bit nonplussed to see that the very first dish we came across was baked seabass cooked, erm, oriental style… I did try some of the salmon with dill sauce, which is something of a culinary cliché. It may be rather damning it with faint praise, but it really was nicer once the dill sauce was scraped off.

There were a good selection of cheeses (something that you don’t necessarily find everywhere you go in Thailand – many Asiatic people are lactose-intolerant) with nice, crusty bread to accompany them.

As usual we didn’t bother with dessert or ice-cream. Neither station’s selection captured our imagination, and in any case we were starting to run out of time before our departure from Bangkok later that afternoon…

Our rating: 3½ out of 5
The food was pretty good, and decent value for money at just 399++ baht per head (ie 399 baht, plus 10% service, plus 7% tax on the whole amount – so that’s really 470 baht). (The beers were a bit on the pricy side, though, at 140++ baht (which works out at nearly 165 baht) for a 330ml bottle, but that’s hotel prices for you.) The staff were friendly, too, although we did find they were verging on the over-attentive, hovering in the background and waiting to pounce the moment there was anything at all they could do to “help”. Still, we’d happily go back again.

Soi 23
Sukhumvit Road
Bangkok

We like to eat a variety of cuisines, it’s true – and one of the big attractions of Thailand is the often excellent standard of a wide range of food styles from all over the world, helped by the huge diversity of Thailand’s agriculture. They grow almost everything here! But from time to time, we like to go back to British basics like fish ‘n’ chips.

There used to be several options for decent British grub in Soi 23, just by Soi Cowboy (one of the girlie bar areas near Sukhumvit Road; it’s actually a sub-soi between Soi 21 (Asok) and Soi 23). Sadly, both the Old Dutch and the Offshore Fish Bar have gone downhill since we first visited them in the late 1990s. It’s particularly disappointing in the case of the Offshore as they’ve got genuine chip shop deep frying equipment made in Rochdale – but the staff there don’t seem to know how to make proper chips any more.

However, there’s one ray of sunshine in an otherwise gloomy landscape: the Ship Inn. Positioned between the Offshore and the Old Dutch, it’s a rose between two thorns.

When we were in Bangkok recently, and the craving for a good feed hit us, Mr ND remembered that we’d had a decent meal there on a previous visit and suggested we go and check it out again properly. We weren’t disappointed. Even though we turned up at that weird limbo time between lunch and teatime, at about half-past-three in the afternoon, we got a friendly welcome and two superbly cold Tiger beers while we made up our minds what to eat.

The menu’s not overly long by any means. This is a Good Thing. Far too many restaurants try to do too much in an attempt to please absolutely everyone, and end up getting nothing right. The Ship does a respectable range of British pub food, a few Thai dishes for those who prefer to eat Thai (handy when it’s a British/Thai couple visiting), and nothing else. Well, what else do you need? It’s a British pub in Thailand, after all.

We ordered two meals: fish and chips, and filet mignon and chips. The fish was excellent! Often when you ask for fish and chips in Thailand, the fish is a sort of off-white or grey, sometimes with the brown bits in the middle that you get around the fish’s spine, which is never pleasant to look at. This fish had none of that; it was properly white, and came in a beautifully crispy, tasty batter. The accompanying tartar sauce (home-made?) was very nice too – even Mr ND liked it, and he’s not a big fan.

The filet mignon was very nice too – a little stringy, but that was doubtless because it was made with local beef rather than imported steak – certainly at the very reasonable price that was charged for it, you wouldn’t expect to get imported meat. Anyway, it was tasty, nicely cooked as ordered (medium rare), and came with a delicious gravy.

The vegetables that accompany your average Thai pub grub can be quite disappointing to say the least – we’ve even known some purportedly upscale establishments to serve miserable, soggy frozen mixed veg, still swimming in lukewarm salty water. Don’t worry; you’ll find none of that at the Ship. The carrots, runner beans and baby corn served with the filet mignon were crisp, colourful and fresh. Delicious! (Not your typical British boiled-to-death veg, I know, but we like our veg to taste of something other than burnt cabbage…)

We thoroughly enjoyed our visit. And to round it off on a high note, Mr ND paid a visit to the facilities just before we left and reported back that they were the cleanest and best-maintained he’d been to for a long time!

Our rating: 4 out of 5
The Ship is a nice, quiet, comfortable place that serves decent food at very reasonable prices, with prompt and friendly service. It’s maybe a little too quiet for some – the first time we went in, we almost didn’t bother on the basis that quiet establishments are generally that way because there’s something wrong with them. This is emphatically not the case with the Ship! If you’re looking for a nice sit-down and a meal away from the hubbub of Sukhumvit or the hustle of Soi Cowboy, try it!