Upon stepping into the spectacular ground floor of the newly launched Public House hotel, my impression was clear-cut and spontaneous.
Eclectic and invitingly communal, the venue seems to conform masterfully to the social club concept, which is the in thing right now in many cosmopolitan cities worldwide.
The open-plan space, an eye-catching showcase of a mid-century design with modern-day art installations by top-tier international artists, encompasses a lounging area, casual restaurant, open bar, podcast studio and co-working zone to offer a constant dynamic vibe.
It has everything a high-flying social club requires, except the exclusivity of the membership. Hence the name Public House.
Located in the well-heeled Sukhumvit 31 neighbourhood, the highly invested hotel -- whose 79 guestrooms spread over 10 floors will be ready in the second quarter of the year -- describes itself as a multi-sensorial social place for food, music, art, conversation and collaboration.
Fest, the subject of this review, is an all-day-dining restaurant serving up comfort cuisine prepared with sustainable ingredients and a touch of creative re-imagination.
The menu lists approximately 60 dishes including a large selection of hearty breakfasts, salads, light meals, pizza, pasta, burgers, meat and seafood mains as well as pastries and desserts.
Drink options are as many and are provided by D'ark, so you can always expect to find highlights such as house-roasted speciality coffee, tea blends and smoothies.
At noon on the weekday I visited, the place was thronged with a casual mix of diners among them families with kids, Japanese housewives, expats and fashionistas.
The food here is offered in generous portions and designed for sharing. Most of the warm dishes, whether it be red meat, poultry, seafood or vegetables, are cooked over flame in a wood-fire oven or at Josper charcoal grill.
My quick lunch for two was simply built around the restaurant's recommended dishes, marked in the menu as "Public Treasure", very convenient for the undecided.
It kicked off nicely with a sharing appetiser of Josper-grilled red Sicilian prawns (690 baht) served on a sizzling-hot cast-iron skillet.
Six sizeable, reddish-orange crustaceans were cooked with confit garlic, parsley, lemon and chilli until all the flavours were imbued in the prawns' creamy meat while the shells and the heads became soft and pleasantly edible.
Pappardelle mushroom (450 baht) spoke for the pasta. It's a scrumptious concoction of well-cooked ribbon-shaped pasta, mushroom ragu, garlic confit and toasted walnuts topped with ricotta-raclette cheese cream and chopped parsley.
For mains, we had Josper-grilled flat-iron steak with French fries (990 baht) and Josper-grilled hamachi fish with broccoli rabi chutney (990 baht).
The first featured flavourful MB4/5 fillets of shoulder-blade steak from a 270-day grain-fed Australian Black Angus beef. The juicy and tender steak, cooked in the Josper grill oven to medium-rare perfection, came drenched in creamy mushroom-garlic butter with red-wine confit shallots. Roasted Spanish padron peppers lent a deep-heat pungency and extra smokiness to the dish.
The fish dish presented a generously thick fillet of the Japanese yellowtail, grilled until the meat developed a firm texture while still retaining its juicy suppleness. The fish was served on a bed of grilled eringi and enoki mushrooms accompanied by miso-hazelnut nugget, broccolini, leek and bean sprouts in a pool of savoury sweet dashi and hamachi bone broth.
My dining companion and I were glad we followed the staff's suggestion by trying the wood-fired four cheese pizza. It was super good, one of the best I've had in months.
Actually, of the five options on the pizza menu, vegan pizza with tomato sauce and broccolini pesto is labelled as the "treasure".
Yet, being no fan of the tomato base, I asked for an alternative. And there it was, the exceptionally aromatic, gooey and creamy jumble of four Italian cheeses: pecorino, scamorza, Taleggio and Parmesan, together with creme fraiche and thyme-honey on top of smoky, billowy and deliciously blistered pizza bread.
Fest's creative take on the globally popular Thai dessert mango sticky rice (350 baht) and an East-meets-West creation of a toasted coconut sundae with vanilla ice cream (350 baht) promise to wrap up your meal in a style.
During my visit, service by the energetic front-of-house crew was folksy and prompt.
