Praew and I like to eat. A lot. Any time we see an interesting new restaurant on the street or in the newspaper, we schedule a time to try it out. In particular, we’ve tried out almost all of the most promising restaurants in the Bang Mod area of Bangkok, and I’ve been asked quite a few times to start blogging the restaurant experiences.

So, by popular demand, here is my first “restaurant review”.

We have been noticing a roadside restaurant with the sign “HABAKITCHEN” on the way back from grocery shopping for a number of months now and finally decided to swing by for dinner. They have a well equipped street side kitchen that we would always see as we drove by.

It is located on Sathu Pradit soi 19 (soi Wat Pho Maen) across the street from Sarasas Ektra School in a shop house:

While it isn’t on our side of the Chao Phraya river, it is a quick expressway hop to get there, and we take the Sathu Pradit exit which is the first one after crossing the bridge.

The chef is an American fellow named Mark. He is quite friendly, and it is clear from watching him cook that he knows his trade.

The decor is simple but well designed. The menu is short but well chosen, with each dish tempting in a different way. I am not a big fan of some of the Chinese style restaurant menus with 20 pages of small font dish options that seem to cover every possible combination of the ingredients they have in the kitchen. I much rather prefer the kind of menu that has a small selection of very different dishes, each one carefully designed by the chef for a different kind of palette.

In my opinion, the menu alone is worth the visit. You have the standards (burger, steak), and the exotic (the “west African style” mackerel dish I ordered, but more on that in a minute), as well as everything in between (calamari, pasta, sunflower seed vegetarian sandwich). Most of the dishes had pictures, making choosing that much easier.

We ended up selecting an “Americana salad” for appetizer, a pork burger, one of the pastas, and “African roasted peppers with mackerel”. (Hey, we were hungry and all the dishes looked pretty darn good.)

It was quite fun to watch the chef cook the meals. The meat is cooked carefully and the smells were difficult to resist if you walk in hungry (like we did).

But whether I am at a new restaurant or one of my regular haunts, I am the kind of person to choose the dish that seems most different from anything I’ve ever had before. On this menu, my attention kept being drawn to the mackerel.

The menu described it as:
Western African style overnight slow roasted peppers, tomatoes, and onions on top of seared mackerel & mom’s morning glory served with jasmine rice.

With a description like that, I just had to try. And it was quite delicious, but man was it spicy. I thought the reference to “slow roasted peppers” in the menu meant bell peppers (i.e. capsicum), but now I’m pretty sure that it was chili peppers. I’m a big fan of mackerel, so I’ll probably order it again, but next time I’ll be more prepared for the kick.

As for the other dishes, the salad was a good choice. The dressing tasted to me like a slightly sweet pesto, and was likely made in-house. The burger was on the appetizers page, and that may be why it was a bit light on the fillings. But the meat was cooked to perfection and had a grilled flavor. Praew and I thought that it would be enhanced by some grilled onions, but maybe we are just picky. And it is always nice when a pasta red sauce doesn’t taste like ketchup (please don’t get me started on Thai style spaghetti), and the “New York style Italian sausage” in the sauce was quite tasty.

Most of the dishes were in the price range of 100-250 baht, although the steaks were in the 500-800 baht range. I didn’t try those yet, but I’ll definitely be heading back. And then there were the waffles and pancakes on the brunch menu. Does anyone want to join me there for Haba Kitchen review part II? 🙂