Boldly Goes Where No Dish Has Gone Before

Take modern cuisine ideas; add some creative culinary wizardry, a pinch of avant garde, artistic flair, and a dash of weird and wonderful science. Now mix together with an experimental approach and you have one of the most intriguing menus in the city, all served up in what looks like a 1930s Agatha Christie style café, restaurant, and bar.

Published on 31/08/2011

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Welcome to the unique and eccentric Aston Gastro Bar located in the Crystal Design Center, where the surreal becomes the sublime and where classic dishes are given a creative makeover without losing any of their original class. Rather than starters and mains, Aston opts for luxuriously classic big plates and small plates which are altogether alternative and the work of a kitchen creationist.

Tuna tartare at 180 thb comes with compressed Asian pear. Flavor is added with a cold smoking gun and the small cubes of fish are tantalizingly good. The frozen shaved foie gras with lychee, pine nut and Riesling gellee, at 380 thb, is both savory and sweet, and like nothing you have ever tasted. The foie gras is frozen with liquid nitrogen so when it grates it does not turn too pulpy. The taste is at once recognizable but totally different than anything you will have ever tasted; both familiar and strange.

The wine jelly is interestingly fruity and the pinenut brittle adds a nutty crunch. The foie gras supreme for 640 thb is an extravagant dish which shows the real art of Aston which is how to perfectly please the palette. The seared yellow fin tuna comes with foie gras and Alaskan scallop, with potato whipped into a velvety puree using a creamer, plus soy and balsamic sauce. The taste lives up to its grand title and is nothing if not supreme. The balance is less to do with molecular gastronomy and more to do with an innate sense of food flavors.

Behind the showmanship, and exciting energy of creating something magnificently modern, there is a respect and understanding of old school, cordon bleu style cooking. There is substance behind the style so the young, hip diners can sit alongside those looking for high-class cuisine.

Fun elements on the menu include the so-called dragon breath, which offers strawberries and raspberries deep-fried in liquid nitrogen at the table so that as you bite down on the crunchy fruits you breathe out a plume of smoke. The black forest dessert for 180 thb comes complete with chocolate soil and a cherry sorbet which uses the science of new age cooking to produce a smooth zest without any ice crystals. Kirsch cream and chocolate ganache create a sweet display of the same same but totally different.

A huge beer menu with some award winning amber nectars adds another ingredient to the unexpected. Whilst the menu at Aston might boldly go where no dishes have gone before, diners can go on a culinary adventure without leaving the restaurant planet of creatively inspired, fine food this side of the solar system.

Visit Aston Gastro Bar's Profile | Map | Gallery