The tiny shop house café has slowly gained a following of neighborhood office workers who need a break from the other joints in Silom. Service is reliably friendly (although getting their attention when you’re upstairs can be tricky) and the place is resolutely different. Kitschy artwork on the walls, postcards and t-shirts for sale and they have their own Chinese fortune sticks in case you’re worried about your future. Food is average and—let’s get this out of the way right now—we’ve had two instances of finding living and dead bugs in it. Once little maggots hid in the oregano shaker (we ate quite a few before noticing and got a free pizza) and once cockroaches had hatched then starved to death inside the ground chili shaker (the entire meal was comped). We can only guess at what goes on in the kitchen. Even without the extra protein, the food is generally barely passable. Their recommended Coppa Woppa pizza with coppa ham, salami, pepperoni, mozzarella and rocket leaves has little to do with a pizza (thick soggy bread, overly sweet ketchup-y base). Just like the pizza, the spaghetti is not Italian. The pasta is cheap and sometimes overcooked but the taste is pleasant enough: their spaghetti with plaa salid, despite heaps of pepper, has good crispy fish. Rubbery and chewy, deep-fried cheese sticks, an appetizer, was served last on our recent visit. The café does produce some good dishes though, like the som tum Bangrak, with a potent sourness and spiciness and real pla ra in it. We also liked how it’s served, with stir-fried noodles as accompaniment, but they need to take it easy with the black soy sauce—you can smell it from across the table. It’s a tough call: Bangrak is really friendly, really cute and the food is ok, but after two critter-encounters, we’re just not ready to go back. Corkage B200.
