Circle
Ruam Rudee Village
Soi Ruam Rudee,
Bangkok 10110
Tel: 02 650 8049

I must admit that when someone says American cuisine, I am rather left cold. I am not sure if they mean Cajun, or Tex-Mex or burgers or something completely different called Californian cuisine, which tends to politically correct fusion suitable for ladies that lunch and weight watchers. However, it is not for me to take sides: I am here to judge the food. So off I went to Circle with some reservations, since I had been there a good few vintages ago. Just to make matters worse, it was a wet Monday evening!
The downstairs area is a bar and general bar type area with stools and high tables. There is also a glass walled kitchen for punters to watch the chefs at work. It looks like this area aspires to trendy cocktail bar status where you can also eat if you so desire. And with the appetisers they do have this could be treated as a tapas bar if that is what you desired.
Upstairs it is well ……white! Before it was broken up room, but now it seems to be a sea of …… white. There are white table clothes and white chair covers and nothing striking that is not white. So rounding the corner from the stairs, I started reaching for my dark glasses. As it was a wet Monday, we were the only customers. No doubt this whiteness would not be so definitive if there were a few people there.

So to the menu, and that is quite an adventure. I may bang on about finding different dishes, or rather the lack of them, in Bangkok, but this was a positive feast of difference. For starters we had oysters Kirkpatrick (bacon and hollandaise sauce) as well as the more well known Rockefeller (spinach and mozzarella cheese), in addition to a portion of crab cakes and crispy Caribbean jerked lamb spring rolls. I was disappointed with the spring rolls, as the lamb in each roll was one or two slithers of lamb that had dried up in the cooking process. Thus I felt it would be better minced. But the rest was good.
For mains there was Andouille sausage stuffed with chicken roll, blackened halibut and southern fried chicken steak as options to the Cajun jambalaya that I had and the honey glazed duck breast that On had. I must admit to generally being a reluctant jambalaya eater, but this came in a bowl and was pretty good. I enjoyed it. The final course was a wonderful rich chocolate mousse that (of course) I should not have eaten!
I did get a chance to speak to the chef and he explained they had gone away from the trendy Californium fusion ideas of his predecessors, although that concept was more modified than dead! The idea was to provide a broad range of more modern dishes and serve them well. On that basis, he was about spot on. The Circle is definitely a worthwhile restaurant with that touch of difference and invention. Certainly worth a small detour!