A taste of immortality

YAOWARAT – Bangkok’s Chinatown – is known far and wide for its endless options in street food and restaurants. Adding to the list is Red Rose, a new restaurant serving “modern Chinese cuisine”. It’s at the Shanghai Mansion Bangkok and the dishes have a decidedly Singaporean flair. Narapong “Chef Tu” Kongcome is out to impress. 

Highly recommended is the sumptuous five-course set “Immortal”, worth Bt1,000. 

It starts with crispy wasabi-prawn salad served with pan-fried foie gras. The sizeable prawn, still juicy on the inside, is coated with a sweet and spicy honey-wasabi sauce and propped atop French foie gras, which adds even more to the savoury aroma.

Next up is thick, creamy, but not heavy Treasure of the Sea, which 

 is double-boiled pumpkin soup with mixed seafood and a thin egg-white crepe. Finely chopped crabmeat, prawn and squid are wrapped in the paper-thin crepe and mixed with pumpkin puree in a delectable soup base that takes two days to churn. 

Pumpkin soup is usually on the sweet side, but this one isn’t at all. Rather it’s quite savoury, light and robust with flavour.

The main dish is Wagyu beef stir-fried with black pepper and bell pepper. Bite-sized chunks of the US tenderloin beef are medium-cooked and 

 tossed with a thick, salty and slightly tongue-numbing black-pepper sauce. The smoke from the wok lingers in the meat prominently, making it very hearty and fulfilling.

Another highlight is the glutinous rice steamed with Chinese herbs and topped with crabmeat. This is quite an intricate dish, both in terms of the taste and preparation. The rice is steamed 

 with aromatic herbs, then dried overnight in a fridge. When the water content is reduced by half, the chef “toasts” the rice in a wok with chunky crabmeat, dried shrimp and more herbs. 

The result is slightly chewy in the “al dente” sense – dry fried rice that’s truly aromatic. It could easily be a meal by itself. 

Cap off the feast with a dessert of warm gingko nuts in syrup, along with young coconut meat. It’s not sickeningly sweet as might be expected. Light syrup is warmed and mixed with the nutty gingko and creamy coconut flesh. Though it’s a hot dessert, it surprising in the way it cleanses the palate, making it a better choice than, say, ice cream or floury cake. 

Until March 5, the set menu comes with yu sheng, an auspicious delicacy for Lunar New Year. Separately the yu sheng costs Bt588 for two and Bt888 for four. 

Red Rose has live jazz every night starting at 7 and its full bar serves not only standard drinks but also Chinese wines and interesting cocktails made with Chinese spirits. A must-try is the Green Chu Yen (Bt280), a pleasant and smooth mixture of Sprite and Chu Yen Ching Chiew – rice whiskey infused with bamboo leaves.

 

JAZZ ADDS SPICE

>>Red Rose is at the Shanghai Mansion Bangkok on Yaowarat Road and open daily from 6 to 10pm.

>>Reserve a table at (02) 221 2121. Check of the “RedRoseJazzBarAndRestaurant” page on Facebook.