Thann is a brand with multiple outlets best known for selling elegantly packaged aromatic oils, candles and creams. Their café is equally impressive, with its sensuous modern furniture and crafty décor made of a myriad cardboard leaves. On the food side, the cakes are baked by Sugarlust and the caterer White Café XS developed the savory menu. The result is pretty ambitious: the appetizer plate alone, with its smoked salmon roulade, crepe cones, and green apple & parma ham wedges is clearly more exciting than your average club sandwich or spaghetti dish (although they have those, too). Unfortunately, creative recipes also mean they have two fronts to fail on: design and execution. The mushroom dip served with okra dusted in wasabi and lotus root chips is an exotic flavor combination, but the deep fried okra and lotus chips needed a fresher dip, like yoghurt, not the thick, earthy one served here. (Or the dip needed a different accompaniment.) Just as bold, and offering a much more successful balance of flavors, the avocado wedges topped with thin slices of tuna and dollops of wasabi mayonnaise and fermented bean paste are a kind of deconstructed California roll minus the rice and seaweed. There’s even a big slice of cucumber with salmon roe mayonnaise thrown in. But not everything is this creative. A lot of dishes take a Thai classic and supplant the main ingredient with something less local, like the salmon cubes in a laarb dressing (B180) or the Southern-style yellow curry with, again, salmon (B280). The latter is desperately underpowered given its supposed Southern origins but otherwise satisfying. Finally, some dishes are just straight up boring: the lasagna is a giant bowl of gooey cheese and pasta—generous but you’ll be bored with it before you’re even a third of the way through. You could just think of Thann as a nice dessert place, with its fancy milk teas and frappes (from B90) and its solid selection of cakes: brownie, tiramisu, pandanus, dark chocolate. They’re obviously freshly baked, given their moist, fluffy textures, but we’re frankly bored of this kind of mix-bake-frost bakery. Isn’t it high time Bangkok’s cafés graduate to coffee eclairs and lemon tartlets?
