Brandon Huisman at The Bale

Chef Brandon Huisman is hungry. He wants to know whether I like pizza, and do I eat pork? I do, and I do. “The chorizo flatbread, please,” he orders as the final dish for our lunch. We’ve a table at sleek-lined Faces, the in-house eatery at The Bale in Bali’s tranquil Nusa Dua. All wood…

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Best lightly fried, Cambodians can’t get enough crickets

PHUM THUN MONG, Cambodia – By day, the expanse of emerald rice fields look like ordinary, peaceful paddies. But when dusk falls, sheets of plastic unfurl from bamboo frames, electric blue neon tubes flicker on, and hordes of Cambodian crickets are lured to untimely, watery deaths. The humble chirping cricket became a part of Cambodians…

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Bangkok’s French connection

“Perhaps more than anything else, it is the French chef’s willingness to question and build on the past, to innovate, to revise, that has kept French cuisine pre-eminent among western cuisines…” So says the Oxford Companion to Food under its entry for France. In Bangkok, it’s two French-trained Thai chefs who are developing French food…

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A new take on tradition

It’s about polishing a traditional concept a little, bringing it line with people’s changing tastes while also subtly improving on it. It’s easy to deduce that the Novotel’s newly-renovated Lok Wah Hin is essentially a Chinese restaurant. Lazy susans spin on tables, under which elegant tall-backed chairs snugly sit, wispy Chinese paintings adorn the walls…

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Tasteful education

If the name Cabbages and Condoms isn’t enough to channel your imagination in the right direction, you’ll get a better idea of what’s to come as you enter this popular Thai restaurant. A small wooden fertility shrine greets visitors, complete with small sculptures of the famed monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil, and…

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Best buys in a shrinking market

As the baht slides against the US dollar, Californian winemakers are feeling the pinch in Thailand. ?We cannot say that Californian wine represents good value for money anymore,? says Uthorn Budhijalananda from The Wine Cellar. ?For good value you cannot compare them to Australian and Chilean wines right now. But compared to many French wines,…

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Be good to yourself … but enjoy

The garden is dotted with the deep purples and whites of Thai orchids here and there; a fountain gurgles and a cat lounges on the well-kept lawn. If health stems from a feeling of tranquility, then the Whole Earth is well on its way to keeping customers happy right from the start. Take off your…

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Time out for tea

While coffee shops are opening in Bangkok almost by the day, teahouses are quietly going about the business of what they?ve always done: serving tea, properly. ?If you compare the present situation to ten years ago when tea was only to be found in Chinatown, then there has been progress, but it remains very slow,?…

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Chile stakes its claim to variety in value-for-money wines

Chilean wines are readily available on the Thai market – they really boomed here about four years ago – and many still represent excellent value for money in a market where the total overall tax is now nearly 400 per cent. Bangkok Fine Wine’s Jonathan Glonek says, "For about 400 baht or under in Bangkok…

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Small country, ambitious wines

The New Zealand wine industry took its first steps back in 1819, but has grown most dramatically over the past decade. Last year the New World country’s wine-makers sold NZ$168.8 million worth of wine to the world, a nearly tenfold increase on the 1990 figure of $18.4 million. And although not much of it is…

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