COCONUTS HOT SPOT – Serving Japanese street food right is a “fine art” so it’s no perhaps no surprise to find a great Japanese eatery amongst the exhibitions of the Bangkok Art & Culture Center.
To dine here, go to the second floor and find the Hof Eat and Art gallery – inside you’ll find Krua Khun Kan, a super-relaxed space filled with street art and delectable food. They serve Japanese comfort food like pork curry and oyakodon, the kind of grub you’d find on the streets of Osaka. Apart from being cooked by two cool chefs, the food is very affordable – and being comfort food, it should be.
While most of the cookie-cutter Japanese chain places play up Japanese food as being “gourmet,” the reality is that most Japanese cuisine is pragmatic and fun. And that’s how it is here; you can sit outside and order from a menu that’s handwritten on sticky notes and posted on the wall or you could sit back with some sashimi salad and try and decode the scribbling surrounding you inside the art gallery. At the center of the gallery/restaurant is a street-style cart with all the fixins’ like shoyu and Japanese mayonnaise to accompany your dishes, not to mention some sweet sashimi.
The art here is the kind that everyone can appreciate. There’s a helium tank, some helmets, an old bike. It’s that kind of funky, weird street-style art that is easy to digest and doesn’t make you feel like you have to sit there and scroll through your mental thesaurus to come up with words to use as you’re pretending to analyze something you know little about. In fact, it’s pretty much the same as the food – something you can enjoy without having to be a connoisseur. It’s not a big deal if you don’t know the Japanese words for different types of sushi here – just pick something off the menu and it’ll be tasty. But here’s the thing, if you are a bit of a Japanese food snob then you’ll really appreciate how authentic it is, and you’ll really get off on how good the prices are.
The BACC is closed on Mondays, and that means Krua Khun Kan is too, but stop in any other day for an interesting lunch, or maybe bring a hipster date here for an early dinner during the middle of the week. Just keep in mind it closes at eight.
Reader Interactions