Three Bars, a Few Blocks, and a Very Good Night in Bangkok
Bangkok is one of those cities where a free evening can turn into almost anything.
I was back in the city for The Boutique Assembly, where I was due to give a talk called The Restaurant Is the New Lobby. It had been almost a year since my last visit, and on my first evening back I wanted to see what had changed, what had opened and what Bangkok’s bar scene was doing now.
That took me around Lumphini Park, Dusit Central Park and Convent Road. Within a few blocks, I visited three bars offering three completely different ideas of what a night out in Bangkok can be.
The part that stayed with me was that I barely had to leave the neighbourhood.
A rooftop bar that understands movement
I started at The NORM Bangkok, on the 42nd floor of the Dusit Central Park office tower. Bangkok has no shortage of rooftop bars, many of which follow a fairly familiar formula: put the bar outside, point the chairs towards the skyline and let the view do most of the work.
The NORM Bangkok. Image via Wallpaper*.
The NORM is more interesting because it treats the rooftop as a sequence of spaces rather than one large room with a very good backdrop. I met with Hampus Thunholm, F&B Director at The NORM, who generously took me through the venue and explained how each of the spaces was intended to work. Having someone walk me through the thinking behind it gave me a much better understanding of the place than I would have had simply arriving for a drink.
There are four distinct zones: the Main Hall, the Circle of EGG, the Pelagus Terrace and the Whispering Room. The Circle of EGG is arranged around Arne Jacobsen's Egg chairs, while the Whispering Room is smaller, quieter and designed for more private conversations. The terrace brings the view and a more social energy, and the Main Hall gives the venue its central pulse.
What I liked was the possibility of progression. You could begin the evening somewhere comfortable, move when the mood changes, find a quieter corner for an actual conversation and eventually end up outside as the music and energy build. The venue gives people reasons to stay without expecting them to want the same atmosphere for four hours.
Bigger spaces often become repetitions of the same seating arrangement, with the atmosphere diluted across too much floor area. At The NORM, the scale has been broken into different occasions, and each zone has a reason to exist.
The furniture is not being used as decoration, either. It affects how people gather, how long they stay and whether a space feels social or private. I was told a fuller food offering is still to come, which should give the evening another layer and make moving through the venue feel even more natural.
Down an alley and into a completely different mood
From there, I went to Cherry Olive Cocktail Club, a new bar tucked away on Convent Road.
Cherry Olive Cocktail Club, Bangkok.
Cherry Olive comes from a group that includes people behind Dry Wave Cocktail Studio, currently ranked fourth on Asia's 50 Best Bars and named the best bar in Thailand for 2026.
It takes its name from two familiar garnishes and builds the concept around the personalities they represent. Cherry is playful, contemporary and more experimental. Olive is classic, controlled and a little more serious. Its debut menu, YOURS, divides twenty cocktails between those two sides and asks guests to choose according to mood rather than simply picking a base spirit.
I had a Cherry Whiskey Sour, followed by the Kickass, which was considerably less restrained. It combines tequila, mezcal, tomato and beef consommé, spices and lager, then arrives with a grapefruit shochu drop shot.
It is somewhere between a Bloody Maria, a michelada and a drinking ritual that sounded questionable on paper but made complete sense once it arrived. More importantly, it was fun. The drink had an idea, but the idea did not require a five-minute lecture before I was allowed to enjoy it.
That balance is harder than it looks. Plenty of ambitious cocktail programmes are technically impressive but exhausting to navigate. Cherry Olive gives the guest a clear way into the menu, then lets the drinks become as strange or familiar as they want them to be.
A classic that still has something to say
The final stop was Vesper, practically next door and one of the established names in Bangkok's cocktail scene.
Rhubarb & Cream at Vesper. Image: Vesper Bangkok / Chomp Magazine.
I ordered Rhubarb & Cream, its take on a Ramos Gin Fizz. The drink brings rhubarb and hibiscus together with almond and vanilla, taking a classic known for its texture and giving it a completely different flavour profile without losing the thing that made the original worth ordering.
After the scale and shifting spaces of The NORM, followed by the playful menu and drop-shot theatre of Cherry Olive, Vesper felt like a reminder that reinvention does not always require an entirely new format. Sometimes it is enough to understand a classic properly and know which part of it to change.
Bangkok makes the case for itself
Bangkok placed eight venues on Asia's 50 Best Bars 2026, more than any other city. Dry Wave placed fourth, Bar Us sixth and Lennon's entered the list at number seven.
Rankings are never the whole story, and I would not pretend that three bars in one neighbourhood amount to a comprehensive study of the city. What was more convincing was that nearly every bartender and hospitality person I met had another neighbourhood, another alley and another bar they insisted I should visit next.
That is what makes Bangkok so exciting. There is the noise and chaos of the street, then a doorway that takes you into a room operating according to its own very specific logic. There are rooftops that use the skyline properly, hidden bars down back alleys and established institutions that still bother to develop a new point of view.
For hotel owners and operators, there is a useful lesson in that variety. The strongest bars are not trying to satisfy every possible version of a night out. They understand the behaviour they want to create, whether that means moving between several moods, choosing a drink according to how you feel or sitting at a familiar bar and discovering a better version of a classic.
Three bars. A few blocks. Three different reasons to stay for another drink.
Not bad for a free evening between conference sessions. Also, probably not the most efficient way to prepare for a morning of talking about hotel restaurants, but research is research.
LEVELS is a hospitality strategy and concept development studio specialising in food and beverage for luxury hotels and lifestyle destinations across Asia Pacific and the Middle East.
