THE LUXURY TRAVEL
MAGAZINE FOR INDEPENDENT
TRAVELLERS

One of the things you don’t expect from a hotel restaurant is an emphasis on health. In fact, most hotel restaurants are so concerned with decadence and flavour that health often falls by the wayside. Not so with Glow, the Metropolitan Hotel in Bangkok’s all-natural and organic health food restaurant.

Here, it’s all about what’s good for your body, and each dish and drink is packed to the brim with vitamins, minerals and enzymes.

It’s also delicious.

We decided to have dinner at Glow, but lunch is obviously the more popular choice, as the meals are quite light. That said, I went for the set menu and was completely full by the end of it – it seemed an endless array of dishes kept coming from the kitchen!

We started with fresh juices or smoothies, chosen from the Glow Juices Menu. There’s an extensive list of extractions or blends – we chose the young coconut and vanilla pod blend, and the mango, honey, yoghurt and cardamon blend. Delicious!

Next up were two complimentary appetizers, which were both unexpected and superb (the avocado yoghurt was particularly good). My set menu offered organic chicken, coconut and galangal broth for a starter – a hot, spicy soup with all kinds of flavours resulting in an explosion of taste. Unlike any other soup I’ve ever had! Mark chose the Glow Caesar Salad, with wholewheat croutons and tofu aioli, which was excellent.

Mains were a host of small dishes – salt and pepper tofu with green papaya and exotic fruit salad, grilled tiger prawns with young coconut, pomelo and chilli paste salad (extraordinary flavours), a robust sour curry of ocean trout with pickled vegetables, and stir fried water spinach. I can honestly say my tastebuds had no idea what to do with all this ... The various accent flavours (lemongrass, coconut and chilli in particular) all combined to create something truly Thai, but at the same time completely fresh and unlike any Thai I’ve ever tasted before ...

Mark’s spiced chicken with zucchini spaghetti, lentils and tomato and basil salad was just as fresh, but not quite as multi-layered in flavour.

And then came dessert. Oh my goodness, what a dessert! I’d heard talk of this mango and black sticky rice dessert (it’s a favourite among Thais, apparently), but I’d never tasted it. I was extremely sceptical, it’s not a particularly pretty dish, and I still find the idea of rice for dessert a little odd. I was totally wrong, it turned out to be absolutely delicious - delicately flavoured, sweet and nutty and refreshing all at once.

The mango in Thailand is the sweetest mango I’ve ever tasted. It came with an exotic fruit salad with lemongrass granita, which was deliciously fresh, and Mark’s chocolate and coconut pudding with fresh banana and passion fruit sorbet was similarly superb.

All in all? The food is so fresh it will redefine what you think of when you hear the phrase ‘fresh food’. It’s also full of unexpected flavours and textures, with strong Thai staples like coconut and pineapple in almost every dish. What an amazing introduction to Thai food!