Dinner at The Dining Room, Grand Hyatt Erawan, Bangkok

Grand Hyatt Erawan
494 Rajdamri Road
Bangkok 10330

Dinner buffet

Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of buffets – I like variety and don’t like being presented with a huge mountain of just one dish to wade through.

We’ve visited Bangkok on several occasions and have always been on the lookout for a decent buffet – the lunch buffet at the Am Café in the Ambassador Hotel is one we’ve tried a few times over the years, and the Westin Grande Sukhumvit (formerly the Delta Grand Pacific) is another. But we’ve stuck very much to the Sukhumvit Road area, near the Nana Skytrain (BTS) station.

So when we found ourselves staying at the Grand Hyatt Erawan right next to the Erawan Shrine in the heart of Bangkok’s posh Chidlom shopping district, we decided to find out whether they had a buffet.

Sure enough, they had several – including a breakfast buffet and a dinner buffet in their Dining Room, off to the left of their capacious lobby’s main entrance. We were warned that we might need to book for the dinner buffet as it was very popular.

We turned up promptly at five to six at the Dining Room entrance and, after a brief consultation with the booking list, were shown to a table for two right next to the entrance desk. Obviously they were going to be busy!

A quick inspection of the various stations revealed a wide selection of many different cuisines including Thai, Japanese, Indian, and Western.

They even had roast beef and Yorkshire puddings, mashed potatoes and nicely crisp vegetables. After seeing mine, Mr ND later followed suit but didn’t enjoy the vegetables as he found them too salty. He must’ve had a different batch from me. Also the Yorkshire pudding had the taste and texture of cardboard.

The beef was really excellent, though – as good as we’ve ever had in Thailand. Our guess is that it was probably imported from Australia. Thailand has a wonderful variety of top quality home-produced food products but beef isn’t one of them.

Also on offer was a sushi and sashimi bar, seafood bar including oysters, salad bar, soups, spicy Thai salad, foie gras, dim sum, pasta and noodles bar. Really there was something for everyone.

There was also a variety of desserts on offer but nothing like the quality and choice at Mantra’s Sunday brunch. (Review of Mantra coming one of these days.)

I had a sherry trifle, attractively presented in a Martini glass. It was nice enough. Mr ND passed on the desserts and went for cheese instead. He said there was a reasonable selection.

It’s actually quite amazing that we remembered at all what we’d had as if you paid an additional THB 599++ (which works out at about £12) per person you could opt-in to their free flow system of sparkling, white or red wine, San Miguel beer, and soft drinks.

We opted for the fizz, although we did ask for a small taste of both the red and white wines. They were fairly typical Italian house white and house red. The fizz was perfectly quaffable, and quaff it we did.

The staff weren’t slow at coming forward with refills. And even kinda talked us into having one more each after we’d already decided to leave. To be fair, I guess we didn’t take much persuading.

The staff were very good in every way – helpful, friendly and efficient, and not over-attentive. In fact we liked them so much we asked for a comment card so we could say so to the management.

The basic price for the buffet is THB 1,125++ for adults (just under £25) – kids get to eat half-price. (It costs more on Fridays and Saturdays, when they have their special seafood buffet – THB 1,499 for adults, or just over £30.) So our bill for two came to just over THB 4,000 (just over £70). After settling the bill, we were given vouchers to the value of THB 600 (over £10), which should come in handy for any future food. The Grand Hyatt Erawan is currently running other special promotions – including a ‘Bring Your Own’ deal where you can bring your own wine and benefit from free corkage.

All in all, a very pleasant evening. We would definitely go back.

Rating: 4 out of 5