While there are many privately run restaurants in Bangkok where you can have an excellent dinner, there are actually only a handful—especially when it comes to European restaurants—where you can be assured of an excellent dinner night after night after night. Based on a few recent meals there, we might be tempted to place Indigo in the latter category—except for the fact that we also remember how the restaurant went through a dark period, during which we had enough lousy meals and lousy experiences there to keep us away for quite some time. Indigo is located across from Starbucks on Convent Road down a once-dingy little soi that it now shares with Himali Cha Cha, a trendy lamp s hop, a new steak place and a butcher shop that is apparently part of the growing Indigo empire. The restaurant is housed inside a beautifully restored L-shaped colonial-style home, and the setting alone makes it worth a visit. A good place to begin is with a drink in the lounge, which opens up into the courtyard. The music is modern and mellow, and there is a good selection of wines by the glass (a dozen or so) at very reasonable prices. For dinner, if it's not unbearably hot and you're not deathly afraid of mosquitoes, the place to be is at one of the umbrella-topped garden tables. (It’s a good idea to book.) The menu, which is really to big for a place this small to maintain, has a sizable fish section, with traditional French offerings like sole and mullet. They also do a Mediterranean-style salt-baked fish for two. But Indigo has always been better with meats, and beef in particular: Just one look at their boucherie, Gargantua (02-630-4577), and you can see where their interest and expertise lie. Start with one of Indigo’s endive salads; one with blue cheese and apples is deliciously balanced between richness and freshness, sweet and savory. We also give high marks to the cheese soufflé, escargot and a ravioli with lobster special, which comes with big chunks of lobster outside of the pasta. The bread is also excellent—from La Boulange just around the corner. But back to the beef. If you’re a fan of steak tartare, the version at Indigo is close to ideal: fresh beef chopped fine but not too fine and expertly seasoned with mustard, chopped capers, etc. Another winner is a tender and juicy milk-fed veal with a creamy morel sauce. For serious beef-eaters, however, the dish is cote de boeuf, which would still be worth every satang if it were half as big. On the menu it says “for two,” but the 1.4-kilo piece we shared recently could have been for three. Or four. Deftly carved tableside, the bone-in meat comes with a savory crust outside and is tender inside—it’s hard to believe this is local (Thai-French) beef. Pinch us. How long will this beef-eaters dream last?
