Bangkok has always had great food in its shopping malls. It’s just that ‘great’ used to mean 30-baht bowls of boat noodles from the basement food court, bought using a convoluted token system, the logic of which has defeated visitors for decades. Now, shopping mall dining means something else entirely.
The recent era of mega-mall openings has lured internationally renowned chefs to the top floors of these developments, not tucked away on a lower ground floor but given prominent billing on high, their sweeping views of an ever-growing cityscape often standing in for a genuine sense of place or, indeed, actual walls.
ICONSIAM led the charge with Alain Ducasse’s Blue. Emsphere followed. Even the comparatively modest Gaysorn Amarin got in on the act with Gaggan at Louis Vuitton, an intimate 30-seat restaurant inside an LV flagship.
And now Dusit Central Park, which opened in September 2025 on the corner of Silom and Rama IV, has entered the conversation. Each new opening seems to make the last generation of malls feel instantly dated. MBK Centre, which felt like the cutting edge of Bangkok retail not so long ago, now has the air of a relic. The pace of reinvention here is relentless.
Dusit Central Park is a 130,000 square metre, eight-floor development, part of a 46 billion baht mixed-use project built on the site of the original Dusit Thani, one of the city’s most venerable hotels. The complex includes a seven rai rooftop sky garden that positions itself as an extension of Lumpini Park across the road, and it drew 70,000 visitors on its opening day alone. This is big-ticket Bangkok development at its most ambitious.
What’s notable about Dusit Central Park’s choice of headlining restaurant, Noi Samrub Bar and Eatery, is that they went local, handing the top floor not to an internationally imported name but to one of Bangkok’s most storied, freewheeling chefs, a decision that says something about how the country’s own culinary talent is now being valued.
Noi Samrub is the latest venture from chef Prin Polsuk and his wife Thanyaporn ‘Mint’ Jarukittikun, the couple behind the Michelin-starred Samrub Samrub Thai. It sits at the top of the mall, wrapping around its upper floor with windows behind the diners and views over Lumpini Park’s green canopy and the city skyline beyond.
Despite its address, you don’t feel like you’re eating in a shopping centre at all. The interior has a wry, knowing quality: chequered tables frequently found in public spaces for playing Makruk (Thai chess), foam replicas of classic terrazzo-style concrete table and bench sets that you see dotted around every public space in Bangkok.
The sprawling, sleek curved counter offers the best seats in the house. It looks over a shelf of fizzing ferments and murky house-brewed spirits (plum Isaan rum, banana skin-infused rice wine, that kind of thing) that openly defy the sanitised logic of the floors below. There’s a youthful irreverence to the whole set-up; a Thai izakaya that feels like it belongs to a different postcode entirely, and it invites you to drink.
Chef Prin cut his teeth as a protégé of David Thompson at Nahm, both in London (where the restaurant became the first Thai establishment in the world to win a Michelin star) and later in Bangkok, before founding Samrub Samrub Thai with Mint in 2017. What began as a post-work gathering of chefs evolved into one of the most important Thai restaurants in the world, now holding a Michelin star of its own and ranked 47th on Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants. Prin’s thing is preservation: he digs through ancient recipe books, works with rural farming communities, and serves dishes that haven’t appeared on a Bangkok menu in decades, sometimes centuries, perhaps never.
At Noi Samrub, though, there’s no dogma to the cooking. Prin is famous for his forensic faithfulness to historical Thai recipes at Samrub – a restaurant that’s reverent but still a lot of fun – but the mood here is looser, more instinctive, more playful.
This is food designed to be eaten with a drink in hand, and the drinks are seriously good. The cocktail programme, built around those spirits visible from the bar, could hold its own on any best bar in Asia list, and it’s pretty much obligatory to work your way through a few before, during and after eating. The pandan campari is particularly special, and the on-tap Sato (the increasingly popular, sake-adjacent, Thai fermented sticky rice wine) goes with everything.
There’s a photobook-style menu to leaf through alongside the main one, great for pointing at when words start blurring and vibrating. The menu moves from snacks (pickled bilimbi with chilli salt, shrimp with garuda crumb and red curry powder) through grilled shellfish and skewers, and into more serious territory, topping out with a grilled phu phan beef rib for 2,700 baht.
What’s particularly lovely is that some dishes which previously appeared on Samrub Samrub Thai’s rotating tasting menus seem to have found a second life here on Noi’s à la carte. Given how transient each Samrub menu is, with a new regional focus every couple of months and dishes that may never return, there’s something generous about giving them a more permanent home at Noi, Prin’s meticulous research allowed to breathe beyond a single menu cycle.
From our visit, the grilled bamboo clams with Southern golae sauce were a highlight: sweet, smoky and slicked with a tart coconut marinade that had caught on the grill and caramelised into something that tasted vaguely obscene. Trang venison skewers with toasted spices were terrific too, the dry spice rub assertively bitter, the meat blushing, its companion relish fruity, glossy, and really fucking spicy.
The crab miang, served with crisp folds of lettuce rather than the more traditional betel leaf, had a build-your-own quality that was in keeping with the get-stuck-in spirit of the place. Miang caramel was replaced with nahm jim seafood to bruising effect. The NFC were the funkiest, most fragrant chicken wings I’ve had in years, the intimidating half dozen dispatched even faster than the frosty Regency highball that had appeared on the counter without me even asking.
To close, grilled aubergine with coconut cream and shrimp paste blurred the line between savoury and sweet so convincingly that the actual dessert, a roasted Japanese sweet potato with coconut cream, felt almost restrained – and somehow earthier – by comparison. Mix them up – this isn’t a place to be fussing about within the confines of mains and puddings. It’s in the blurred liminal spaces where the real fun happens.
A tip: dine late. After your meal, head up to explore Dusit Central Park’s rooftop sky garden. By that hour the crowds will have gone, the pathways roped off until tomorrow, and you’ll have the gardens and their panoramic views over the city to yourself. Then exit back down through the mall after hours, when the shops are closed and staff are changing the displays around you, shuffling and sweeping, and the whole building takes on a different surreal energy. It’s one of those evenings that could only happen in Bangkok.
Address: Rama IV Rd, Si Lom, Bang Rak, Bangkok 10500, Thailand
Instagram: @noi_samrub_bar
