Gastronomic travelogue: Speedboat Bar is inspired by Bangkok’s Chinatown
(Picture: Adrian Lourie)Towards the end of lunch at Speedboat Bar in Soho, I flagged down a server to try to order a coffee. “Ah,” she said, furrowing her brow a little. “So, the only coffees that we do have alcohol in them.” She pointed at something frothy and forbidding, called a Cafea Yen Turbo, and a little hundreds-and-thousands-sprinkled shooter that looked like the precise prelude to a night of karaoke bars, table-dancing, and an impulsive Thai script tattoo that regrettably turns out to be an inaccurate translation of “free spirit”.
It was a small moment but, I think, an instructive one when it comes to this place. Speedboat, which is the latest Southeast Asian-inspired collaboration between chef-grower Luke Farrell and hospitality juggernaut JKS, is exactly the sort of restaurant where even something as benign as coffee is a further inducement to mischief.
