How Much?!

It's always nice to have dinner with a view, and so we made our way to the top of the State Tower, and the much-hyped Breeze restaurant.

We started off with a drink on the 63rd floor at the vertigo-inducing Sky Bar. Wow, this place is incredible, underneath the up-lit dome and at the bottom of a large sweeping staircase, you feel as though you are suspended above the city as you sip your cocktail at the glowing neon bar. If you want to feel like you are in a Hollywood movie, this is the place to come.

Unfortunately it pretty much went downhill from there, literally and figuratively, as we descended 10 floors to Breeze for dinner. The horror began when they handed us the wine list, and the cheapest bottle on there was £50/$150 - but the problem was it wasn't even for good wine, it was for the type of wine you would pick up at the supermarket on the way home to accompany a Tuesday night bowl of pasta. I know there is a 400% (!) import tax on wine in Thailand, but even the Peninsula hotel bar was 4 times cheaper than Breeze!

Things didn't get much better with the food menu, I'm afraid. Average-schmaverage dishes for exorbitant prices. If they had been offering really creative dishes with exotic, sought-after ingredients, I wouldn't have minded paying the prices they were asking, but it really grated to pay that kind of price for stir-fried local ingredients.

We tried to stick to dishes that were under $50/£15, which, believe me was a challenge (with many dishes being well over $100), and with careful choosing ended up with a nice selection, starting with Chicken in Pandan Leaves



and continuing with Stir-fried Prawns,



Roast Duck



and some Baby Pak Choi.



Thankfully the food was tasty... although really nothing special, and certainly not worth the ridiculously over-inflated prices.

I was even reprimanded by the waitress for photographing their menu - little wonder, they're probably worried that other people will see how ridiculously priced their food and drink is and not want to go. I was told to 'contact our PR department'... yeah, ok, whatever, get over yourselves... They call themselves 'Asia's finest Asian Seafood Restaurant'... I'm not sure who decided that, but if you replace the world 'finest' with 'overpriced' you might be somewhere nearer the truth.

So for anyone planning to go here, my advice would be... enjoy a cocktail or two at the stunning Sky bar... and then get the hell out of there and go find somewhere else for dinner...

Breeze, Bangkok - http://www.breezebkk.com/