Any discerning member of the nighttime fraternity knows that any night out playing in Bangkok needs to be started well and we were in search of the best of the best on this Saturday night in September, knowing that it would all be downhill from there. Thomas Jones gets a Thai high.

It is indeed a long way down from the top of The Dome at lebua, Bangkok’s tallest hotel and it’s a place where those in search of something exclusive and exquisite come to drink, feast and play. At the Dome guests can find Mediterranean, Italian and Asian cuisines, an oyster and caviar playground and drinks and interesting people aplenty, and all with the same thought on their mind, having the best of fun.The best place to start any good meal is with a pre-prandial cocktail or two, and here on floor 64, Distil is a super elegant and cool, 650 square metre bar experience par excellence. It has one of the best selections of premium liquor in Thailand including 10 Cane rum, Belvedere IX vodka, Martin Miller’s gin, and Johnnie Walker Blue Label King George V whiskey, so is all in all a real connoisseur’s paradise. Add one Oyster Bar and you have no reason to leave. The resident mixologists know their way around the outside of a bottle better than a drunk knows his way around the inside and mixed me up a couple of real winners that I never thought possible. Glenmorangie with orange, anyone? Try it, you’ll like it! I’ll have another, thanks.

We had come to dine at Sirocco, an open-air terrace restaurant 200m above the city lights to see what all the fuss was about. Leaving Distil and out onto the wide, sweeping and beautifully lit stairway that leads down one floor to the restaurant, the multi-coloured Sky Bar takes centre-stage and seems to sit suspended in space. The reason behind its hype is obvious. Before you is a night time cityscape that Ridley Scott would be proud to call his own. It’s staggering how far it goes off in each direction on a flat plane and looking out over the glass encased railings this is certainly not for the faint of heart. I’ve seen it in Tokyo, New York, Jakarta and more, but never so clear over a designer five-course meal in the world’s tallest al fresco restaurant with the wind blowing in my hair. Just to make the breeze sweeter, live jazz wafts from a stage high above the dinner crowd on the gentle warm breeze of the city, from which the restaurant must take its name.

The chefs at the restaurant have their work cut out for them since the food has to compete with its massively charged surroundings, and compete it does. French langoustine, sea bass and Alaskan diver scallop; White truffle cloud and Provençal crisp; Mediterranean octopus “A la Plancha”; Armagnac prunes, forest mushrooms and beer-dijon mustard reduction; Trofie pasta, parsnip mousseline and xeres sherry-tarragon reduction; and the all important pan roasted “Soulard” foie gras; the list goes on and sometimes requires a culinary dictionary to get your head around, but all definitely a delight to eat and worthy of the setting. If you are looking for that romantic place to propose to your future ex-wife, however, make sure you get a table away from the raised bar area at the front if you don’t want to feel like people are looking over your shoulder.

I wasn’t proposing to anybody this night, however, so after dinner it was into the corral of the Sky Bar proper to get a feel for being on top of the world, or at least the top of one of the most exciting cities in Asia before the rest of the night started to unfold. No visit to Bangkok should be considered complete without the elevator ride and three-cocktail combination into the starry street light nightscape of lebua’s Scirocco and Sky Bar, one of the most exciting locations in Asia and night life at its most pure.

Scirocco & Sky Bar
lebua at State Tower,
Silom Road, Bangrak, Bangkok,
Thailand, 10500.
Tel. +66 2624 9555
www.lebua.com

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