Bangkok at Golden Hour — Inside the Kruathai Cocktail Program

Most Thai restaurants treat the bar as a footnote. A house red. A chang beer. Maybe a Singha if you ask. We thought about that for a long time before we started writing the bar program at Kruathai — and decided it was a kind of insult to the food.

So we built a real one.

The pantry is the same

The trick most American bars make when they "go Asian" is to import a lemongrass syrup from a wholesaler, slap it into a margarita, and call it Thai. We don't do that here. The lemongrass behind our bar is the same lemongrass in the green curry. The kaffir lime leaves in the gin gimlet are torn from the same bag as the panang. The palm sugar that sweetens our old fashioned is the same palm sugar that finishes the jaew.

That's the rule: if it's not in the kitchen, it's not on the bar.

It sounds simple. In practice it means we run an unusually short list of cocktails — about a dozen at any given time — but every one of them tastes like it grew next door to the food.

Five flavors, drink edition

Thai cooking is built around five flavors: salty, sweet, sour, spicy, bitter. Pull the balance even slightly and the dish dies. We take the same approach behind the bar.

• ◆Salty comes from a fish-sauce caramel we paint on the rim of a few highballs, and from sea salt finishing on a spicy margarita.
• ◆Sweet comes from palm sugar, condensed milk, and ripe Thai fruit.
• ◆Sour comes from kaffir lime, calamansi, and tamarind.
• ◆Spicy comes from prik-kee-noo (Thai bird's-eye chili), chili-infused mezcal, and a Sichuan peppercorn tincture for tingle.
• ◆Bitter comes from a house bitters batched with galangal, cardamom, and a touch of coffee.

Build a cocktail with all five and it will taste, somehow, like dinner.

Three drinks worth knowing

The Lemongrass Old Fashioned

Bourbon, lemongrass-infused demerara, two dashes of the house galangal bitters, expressed kaffir lime peel. It's the cocktail Executive Chef Noon orders when she's writing a new menu. Smoke, lemongrass perfume, just enough citrus snap to wake up the back palate. Pair with: the lamb rack, the duck noodle soup, anything off the grill.

The Butterfly Pea Gimlet

Gin steeped with butterfly pea flower (anchan — the blue-violet petal woven through Thai dessert tradition), house lime cordial, a single drop of pandan tincture. Goes electric blue when you pour it. Goes bright violet when the lime hits. Tastes like a garden in monsoon season. Pair with: anything with coconut milk — the panang curry, the tom kha, the massaman.

Bangkok Golden Hour

A long, low-proof highball — Thai whisky, fresh-pressed pineapple, lime, ginger, and a salted lime soda topper. Built tall, served over crushed ice with a fan of mint. Named for the half-hour just before sunset on Sukhumvit, when the sky goes the color of a peach and the city slows for exactly fifteen minutes. Pair with: lobster pineapple fried rice, snapper with panang curry, Sunday brunch.

A soft note on alcohol-free

We take alcohol-free drinks seriously — not because we have to, but because Thai cuisine has always had non-alcoholic pairings that hold their own at the table. Our zero-proof menu currently includes:

• ◆A coconut-water tom kha tonic, made with the same broth base as the soup
• ◆A roselle (red tea hibiscus) cooler with lime and ginger
• ◆A pandan-citrus highball, on tonic
• ◆An iced Thai tea built à la minute, no condensed milk shortcut

The point is that a guest who isn't drinking tonight should still feel like a guest, not a designated driver.

What we don't make

A few things we politely do not pour:

• ◆Pad thai-flavored anything. No shrimp-paste martinis. No tamarind margaritas. There's reverence and then there's gimmick.
• ◆Mass-produced Thai iced tea pre-mix. Ours is brewed.
• ◆Sweet, syrupy cocktails for the sake of being sweet. Thai food is balanced. The drinks should be too.

Why this matters in Atlanta

Atlanta's bar scene has gone deep on bourbon, on agave, on natural wine. It hasn't gone deep on Southeast Asia. We think there's an opportunity here for the kind of guest who's already done the rounds at the city's best bars and is looking for something they haven't tasted before — without having to fly to Bangkok.

That's what the bar at Kruathai is built for. Marble bartops. Crystal chandeliers. A team that's read more cocktail books than is healthy. And a pantry that smells the way our kitchen smells when curry pastes are coming together — like rain on a Thai market at dusk.

Reserve a seat at the bar →

Chon kaew. Cheers.

See also

• ◆Meet Executive Chef Noon — the family kitchen behind Kruathai
• ◆What is Panang Curry? — the dish we'd pair with the butterfly pea gimlet
• ◆The full menu — what to drink with what to eat