Sorn (**)

Two Michelin star restaurant Sorn serves a 20-course menu based on traditional southern Thai food. It is very difficult to make a reservation. There are 40 place settings per evening and 20% of the seats are reserved for foreign guests. You have to keep an eye on Instagram or Facebook before making the reservation, there will be an announcement and you must make a reservation immediately. When we made the reservation for November in October 2022, the month was fully booked within 10 minutes. We were lucky to get a table.

Take into account the traffic in Bangkok, we took about 1.5 hours on the journey that normally takes 20 minutes.

There is 1 menu that is served and you indicate in advance that you eat fish and meat. These are the main ingredients in South Thai cuisine, so you can’t deviate from them.

There are two wine packages, one with 5 glasses and one with 8 glasses. We choose the 5 glasses.

Before we start with the menu, the head waitress introduces herself, she is our hostess tonight. She speaks perfect English and has a great knowledge of the dishes. The lady is carrying a large live shrimp in a glass jar. The prawn is bathing in white wine.

The shrimp will be smoked later; to ease the suffering and for the taste, the shrimp is in white wine. After 15 minutes, the shrimp that has been grilled on charcoal is served. The charcoal flavor is very present, very tasty.

Then the amuse-bouches are served. We start with a guava with crispy onion and a cracker made from figs. The taste is very refreshing, the crispy onion gives it a crispy character. Good flavor combination.

We also get cucumber with chili paste, fish paste and cashew nut. When you think of cucumber, you immediately think of watery and refreshing, but here you are deceived by the chili paste and fish paste. The spices explode in your mouth. We didn’t see this coming.

After these dishes we start with the menu

We receive crab with mushroom and mussels. The mushroom and crab are fried in rice oil. The ingredients are quite crunchy. Delicious.

No wine, but a beer is served with the amuse-bouche and the first course. This is a Thai beer that is very difficult to obtain. Sorn is one of the restaurants with the exclusive right to serve this beer. The beer is slightly bitter and goes well with the amuse-bouche and the crab.

Next comes lobster with pickle and seashell. First, the ingredients are put on the table.

The lobster is cooked very briefly and is therefore almost raw. The lobster meat has a soft texture. Underneath the lobster lies a spicy mango puree that is green in color. The combination of mango with lobster is very good. Two preparations of seashell are on the plate, one with oil and one with chili paste. The flavors are totally different, you feel like you are tasting two different dishes while both are seashell. Next to it is pickle. The latter is extremely sour. Wow!

Sake is served as wine. This sake has a sweet taste. Pairs well with the lobster and seashell.

The ingredients of the crayfish with rambutan (a red tropical fruit) and salted duck egg are shown. Rambutan resembles lychee.

A kind of ball is served where the ball is made from the head of the shrimp. Shaved salted egg yolk on top. Next to it is a piece of shrimp varnished with rambutan. It looks like nothing has been done to the shrimp because it had the color of shrimp, but if you look closely you can see that there is a layer on the shrimp.

Again very tasty dishes. Well done.

A blend of Muhr – van der Niepoort from Austria is served as wine. A dry white wine that goes well with the shrimp.

Ginger ice cream made from the ginger flower as a flavor neutralizer. Both the flower and the leaves are used. The flower has a sweet taste and the leaves taste and smell like coriander, but slightly more sour. A tasty dish to tame the taste buds. This flower is called foreign coriander in Thailand.

Crab leg cooked and topped with a large layer of chilli paste. This is a spicy dish but so very good. It is also known that this is one of the most spicy dishes, so that a spoon is served immediately with the dish for the next dish. This is served right after the crab.

The dish that should cool your taste buds after the yellow chilli is coconut with dried squid and dried shrimp. A coconut soup is served with all the ingredients of the coconut tree. The coconut, coconut water and the tree branch. A soup is made from this. The leaves are processed into an oil that sits on top of the soup. A slice of fried coconut floats in the soup. You immediately feel that the spiciness disappears.

One of the chef’s most famous dishes: the sea meets the forest. Various ingredients such as pomelo, lime grass, puffed rice, bean sprouts and spring onions are neatly arranged on a plate. A very colorful whole to look at. In between are some shrimps and some seaweed to get the sea to the land. A sauce is poured over these colorful ingredients and then everything is mixed into a large salad. It instantly becomes a Thai salad. Wow. What a find!

The main course consists of 8 different dishes that are served one after the other.

The chef comes to explain the dishes. We first receive succade with curry. The beef is cooked for 4 hours in Thai herbs. The chef explains that he can make this curry with a perfectly cooked piece of meat, for example wagyu, but because he cooks traditionally in Thai style, he does not do that and ensures that the meat is tender and completely well done.

We also get crab curry. The crab is cooked in coconut milk for 3 hours and then further cooked in spices. What a great dish.

All this is served with roti prepared on charcoal. It is recommended to eat half of the meat and half of the crab with the roti because jasmine rice is served afterwards.

The roti is cooked on charcoal on the table.

The jasmine rice comes in a clay pot and is cooked over charcoal in the traditional way. We also saw the rice being cooked because we have a view of the kitchen. Cool to see all the clay pots.

Next comes crispy pork belly that has been roasted for a long time. I’ve never had such a crispy crust. What a delicious dish. Stinky beans and tamarind chili are served with the pig. A very tasty whole.

Pumpkin with quail egg and lobster is put on the table. The pumpkin is made with tomalley. This is made into a kind of curry. The quail egg is fried briefly. Delicious!

Yellow curry with fruits is also served.

All kinds of spices are served, such as leaves from the Brazilian pepper tree, leaves from the cashew nut tree, mango ginger and red corn. You eat these spices with the various dishes. We receive a card that indicates which spices go best with which dish. In a word WOW what an explosion of flavor this chef delivers.

Finally, a coconut and fish sauce soup to rest your taste buds and let the fullness of the curries sink away.

A Chateauneuf du pape 2020 is hereby served The glass is refilled several times.

Then comes sago in young coconut water cooked with longan ice and frozen young coconut. Sago is a kind of herb that you cannot eat, when it is cooked it becomes a jelly-like substance. Longan fruit is related to the lychee.

As wine we get a Beerenauslese from Kracher.

Finally, we get canned fruit, although they are fresh melons, they are served canned. This consists of 2 types of melon in various preparations.

Then comes coffee with the friandise car. We get all the friandises from the cart such as caramel in banana leaf, blue jelly, coconut milk cookie with brown sugar and pineapple. A true artist is in the kitchen here.

We saw the egg cake being made. Dough is poured into a pan, both above and below the heat of charcoal ensures that everything rises and that the biscuit is cooked. The whole pan is served.

Coconut milk cookies resemble poffertjes and are baked in a poffertjes pan. We enjoyed.

There are several areas in this building. We are in a room with 2 tables. Both tables have a view of the kitchen. We sit next to each other and have a view of the kitchen.

The restaurant is located in an old stately building.

The staff is very courteous. The hostess speaks perfect English, the service speaks little or no English. This is not a disaster, the hostess is around all evening. The chef comes to the table to explain dishes and to indicate why he cooks Southern Thai. What a very nice man this is.

If you get the chance to book here, do this, this restaurant has been voted the best restaurant in Thailand and is in the top 50 in the world. This is more than deserved! It is very difficult to make a reservation, we hear from several people that we were so lucky that we were allowed to eat here.