Ping’s Thai Teochew Seafood Restaurant, Pathumwan Princess Hotel, Bangkok

We were recommended to try the food at Ping's (2nd floor, Pathumwan Princess Hotel, 444, Phayathai Road, Bangkok 10330, tel : +66 2 048 4755) by a friend. The restaurant does Thai Teochew food which sorta reminds me of the things that we had back in Scala previously.

One of the things to order here is apparently their braised fish maw and crab. The soup from what I hear was made with a base of chicken broth infused with the flavours of the ingredients that made the dish. If anyone's wondering, this wasn't the starchy stuff that's thickened with flour. Delicious with and without vinegar.

There was dim sum on the menu so we had an order of siew mai. Pretty decent.

That's fish maw stir fried with tiger prawns. The tomalley from the prawn was the main flavouring agent for the stir fry and had basically infused all the springy fish maw. Need I say more? It's as good as the one at Scala. Wished we had gotten a larger portion.

Ping's does a kickass braised goose web mee pok. Those tender goose web were suck off the bone tender, infused with the flavour of the braising sauce which had also been absorbed by the flat noodles. While I'm generally one for noodles that are firm with a bit more bite, these tender ones totally agreed with me.

Their river prawn vermicelli was also delicious. The restaurant got us a sizeable bug of about 500 grams. The melting tomalley and roe basically glued parts of the vermicelli together into a delicious mess. Like the goose web mee pok, the bottom of the pot was layered with caramelized pork belly slices and little bulbs of garlic which had no doubt lent their flavour to the dish.

Dessert was also kickass. Unassumingly so if I might add. Their coconut jelly was a whole coconut of meat and coconut juice jelly. I had initially thought it to be simply agar agar from the gelatinous appearance but had realized that after the first mouthful that there was much less gelatine involved in it than I had thought. The chilled jelly was pretty much solid coconut juice which melted as soon as you popped them into the mouth.

Their water melon juice was really sweet. Sweetness that made us a little wary, wondering if additional sugar was added.

In retrospect, this was a very satisfying lunch at Ping's. Most of what we had today were good enough by themselves that we'd gladly come back just for those.