You may have heard about Gateway, the new community mall at Ekkamai BTS that just opened up. You may also be confusing Gateway with the other community mall that opened last week, or the one that opened up across town last month. Here’s the easiest way to tell this one apart: This one’s a Japanese lifestyle mall.
So you should be able to get blasted with your business buddies, sing karaoke, buy panties from a vending machine, and then hit the arcade for some Dance Dance revolution all while having your tie worn around your head like a bandana, right?
Well, you can’t do any of that here. But what you can do is take in the Japanese décor and enjoy the J-pop music playing in the background.
Gateway is comprised of eight stories of restaurants, shopping stalls, convenience stores and a supermarket. The top two floors are geared towards tech and electronics, then there’s the upscale stall setup (Just like the Japanese section at Terminal 21) below that. Lastly you have the food, the only thing genuinely unique to this mall.
The main draw here is interesting new restaurants that are actually Japanese, like R Burger, a semi-popular burger joint from Tokyo that uses Chinese-style steamed sweet buns in lieu of tradition hamburger buns and offers a tuna burger, or Ramen Kourakuen, an authentic ramen shop with very reasonable prices. If you’re a lover of cuisine from the Land of the Rising Sun, look no further than the ground floor. Surprisingly, the venue could use a few more options in the way of sushi
No mall foregoes the traditional Thai food court, and Gateway is not an exception. If you’re on a budget there’s an open-air hawker center downstairs, along with another hidden gem: a 24-hour MaxValu supermarket that has a good selection of sake. This is a welcome 24-hour alternative – sometimes a man needs more than a simple 7-11 or Family Mart can offer.
So is Gateway worth a trip? Die hard Japanophiles are not going to find any harajuku people or conveyor-belt sushi joints, but they will be treated to Japanese toilets and giant origami-esque art hanging from the ceiling. For the rest of us, it’s just another community mall that happens to have a great selection of Japanese restaurants.
