Call it Bangkok’s Lower East Side. Home to Thai celebrities, VIPs, Japanese businessmen and sophisticated expats, the district has more recently emerged as a wonderland of upmarket dining, drinking and partying. (Locals call Thonglor “hi-so,” as in high society.)
Making for artful Instagram bait, several ultra-contemporary, multilevel “community malls” heavy on food and drink have sprung up since 2016. Meanwhile the area’s main drag, Sukhumvit Soi 55, and an extensive network of side streets are dense with speakeasies, cafes, sushi, ramen or izakaya outposts and more. 2017 even saw the opening of a sizable CrossFit facility in a 1950s house.
Like Bangkok’s hipster enclave, Ari — the city’s Williamsburg, for comparison — Thonglor is geographically and demographically removed from backpacker-riddled Khao San Road and anyplace, palace or market where terrifying swarms of tour buses unload (it takes between 45 and 90 minutes by taxi from the Grand Palace, heading southeast). Although the area previously merited a blip in various guidebooks for world-famous street food on Soi 38, vendors there were displaced in late 2016 for new condo construction.
httpss://nypost.com/2018/01/22/the-ultimate-guide-to-bangkoks-coolest-neighborhood/?utm_campaign=partnerfeed&utm_medium=syndicated&utm_source=flipboard
Today, Thonglor is the domain of in-the-know locals . . . and, now, you.