Drinks To Dine For

Eating out in Bangkok’s fabulous restaurants is not just about food.

What you drink and when you drink it can either whet your appetite or make you feel full before you’re fed, complement your culinary choices or make a decent dish a disaster and then leave you feeling sated or agitated.

The start of the evening really begins with an aperitif. An alcoholic tipple before dinner can help stimulate your hunger pangs and there are certain drinks that work well with working up an appetite. Gin and tonic is not just a refreshing palate cleanser. Tonic contains quinine which is what makes the tummy rumble. Grapefruit naturally contains quinine, so a grapefruit mixer with a dash of alcohol has the same effect.

Be advised though to make that only a dash of alcohol, unless you want to be under the table rather than eating off it. Grapefruit is known to affect the concentration of the blood and the effect of some medications, including alcohol, in the system.

As well as sipping cosmopolitans, diners in Bangkok can decide on different pre-dinner drinks from around the world in the cosmopolitan array of restaurants. You might sample ouzo at Bangkok’s Greek restaurant Athena or pastis at French restaurant Aubergine . For an appetite like an Italian stallion you could sip vermouth at Duilios .

When it comes to drinks to dine for, you really cannot go wrong with a well-bodied bottle of wine. From table top plonk to fine reserves, Bangkok’s imbibers can relax, crack open the chardonnay and claret and transport themselves to Europe, Australia and South America. This is the only way to travel through fine foods from around the world.

Opus takes stock of the importance of wine with its bottle stock kept in a walk-in wine cellar that controls the right temperature and humidity. For all the positive attributes of Bangkok, the Asian climate is not exactly suited to preserving the integrity, bouquet and balance of a bottle of Beaujolais.

To keep the Asian flavour in the wine restaurants of Bangkok is Lo Shu. Designed with Feng Shui principles of natural flow in mind, the wine also flows freely too and when Asia meets good wine a French-Asian inspired menu is created. One restaurant that has popped open a few corks is Italian eatery Vino di Zavotti . Choosing the food is perhaps easier than choosing which one of the 500 different wines to order.

All this eating and drinking is of course exhausting, if not entertaining work, is it not? Once the plates are cleared nothing is nicer than settling down into some serious after-dinner relaxation with a digestif. These spirits and liquors are served neat and purport to get the digestive juices going and settle the stomach. Whether it is a port, brandy, madeira, whisky or perhaps a grappa, the digestif acts to calm down the system. Sipping a digestif is the final luxurious moment of a delicious meal out and is definitely one of the drinks to dine for.