This restaurant offers a wide range of Bangkok flavours at reasonable prices.
While many places aim to “transport” you to another country, Bang Bang Bangkok wants to bring Thailand to you. Thanks to immersive projection technology, the Brooklyn-based fine dining restaurant lets you savour the tastes of Thailand's capital city without ever leaving Gotham.
Bang Bang is modelled on a bus, with windows and benches for customers to sit on, and is full of quirky touches, such as tourist-friendly travelogue footage projected on a wraparound screen inside the restaurant, conveying the feeling of travelling around Bangkok.
The result is a two-hour VR journey that takes bus “passengers” digitally around Thailand's capital city, a sensory journey that is enhanced by Bang Bang's 10-course tasting menu, with roughly one dish sampled at each stop along the tour.
Bang Bang, located at 131 Grand Street in Williamsburg, is the brainchild of restaurateur Jukluwat Jay Bolin. Maomao in Brooklyn and Jai San Ma in Queens.
“I'm not in the restaurant business. I'm in the experience business,” Bolin, 45, told The Post. “I can take you to another world.”
To achieve this magical scene, the Bangkok native assembled a team to photograph the iconic landmarks of his hometown. Famous for its maze-like floating marketThe vast Chinatown district and even the alleyways are worth seeing.
He used a technique called projection mapping, which is the conversion of various objects into display surfaces for projection — in this case, a fake bus interior. Today, this type of spatial augmentation technology is used to create optical illusions in buildings, Broadway shows, and of course, restaurants like his.
Bang Bang allows foodies to smell the distinctive fish sauce wafting from the food stalls of a night market and feel the jet-lagged haze of racing through the neon-lit streets of the entertainment district.
With this new concept, “you don't have to go to Bangkok or anywhere else in the world,” Bolin explained, and his goal is to bring the “beauty” of his hometown to New York.
Food-wise, the menu features a European take on traditional Thai dishes, such as the Bangkok, a delicious trio of pork tarts smothered in coconut foam, steamed pork balls wrapped in cabbage, and chilled lobster soup with lime foam and blanched tomatoes – a gazpacho-style take on tom yum goong soup.
Other dishes include the “Noble,” smoked duck with red curry sauce and a tangy lychee puree, topped with a sprinkling of lime and thyme using a hairspray-like bottle.
Before each course, Bang Bang's manager, Prachak Seniwong Ayutthaya, provides detailed explanations about the food being served and where it will be served.
“We're taking you through the local streets of the Old Town,” he declared at the start of a recent tour.
Also worth mentioning is the Wisdom, which features a choice of slices of marbled Wagyu beef smeared with flavorful shrimp paste, or deep-fried “Chilean sea bass” (the marketing term for the Patagonian toothfish) served with chilli sauce, baby mustard greens and more.
Patrons round out the culinary decathlon with a rendition of mango sticky rice, a classic Thai dessert, with mango sorbet instead of the real thing, and it comes with sticky rice cake and coconut mousse instead of the usual coconut milk.
Total price for two: $357.
Bang Bang joins a growing ranks of immersive dining experiences in New York that demand the use of more senses than just smell and taste.
In “Le Petit Chef” on Broadway, Little animated chefs “prepare” tasting menus; Digital Enhancement of Flatiron Dinner Theatre Journeyand at Sansan Ramen in Queens, hostesses take orders over Zoom from the Philippines.
Bolin will now return to Bangkok to plan and film a more detailed digital tour, which he plans to launch in Bang Bang within the next 12 months.
“If you want to take people into the real world, you have to choose from real things,” he explained.
Open daily from 4:30pm to 11pm. 131 Grand St., Brooklyn. Bang Bang Bangkok New York
