Roast combines artisanal coffee-making with excellent brunch and tapas offerings. The pride and joy of this enormous, huge-windowed space is the giant black and gold coffee roaster sat along the back wall, and its hipness appeal can only be described as the caffeine equivalent of a vintage Vespa. The rest of the décor is all straight lines, marble tables and retro café chairs. It is the sort of space where one can seamlessly transition from Wi-Fi-ing with a cup of coffee to brunching with friends, to dining with your special someone.
After some false starts, Roast has settled for a tapas menu in the evening: heavy on the lime and garlic, its flavors are refreshingly Mediterranean despite the Thai ingredients. Many dishes follow the same winning formula: comforting, fried produce with tangy, lime-heavy sauces to cut through the fat, such as the fried crab cakes with tartar sauce and tomato salsa (B320); meatballs on guacamole (B180); and calamari on a tangy, garlic aioli (B160).
Despite recurring fried-meets-lime combinations, little details keep things interesting. The aforementioned meatballs, for example, come with slivers of fried garlic, sun-dried tomato and parmesan that all bring rich umami notes; and the roasted vegetables (B160) are doused in a delicious garlic pesto sauce with a crunchy texture. Not that everything is perfect—a pretty boring tuna tartar (B200) and liver pate (B160) come to mind—but the overall quality is quite high. The brunch, too, gets high marks. They’re paying attention to detail, like making their own herb-intensive sausage patties and a hash with duck and potatoes; and the room can get packed so you better book on weekends.
The other big highlight, obviously, is the coffee, made with single-origin, in-house roasted beans (French press B120-140, espressos B80-140)—but we’d really like to see more people visit Roast in the evening. Their new rack of wine, with bottles starting from a mere B790 and some very nice options in the B1,090-1,290 range, is the perfect match to fun, well-executed tapas dishes which, while not exactly cheap, are a refreshing change from the standard Spanish options in Bangkok. Corkage B400.
