Ms Maria & Mr Singh Bangkok restaurant review: It’s Just Damn Delicious
Ms Maria & Mr Singh Bangkok would not work in lesser hands, but there’s magic here and tasty rules the day. Wear shorts, bring friends--and your appetite.
Reader, let me pull back the veil and let you in on something restaurant critics seldom discuss.
It concerns fine dining, specifically the palpable gap between spectacle and joy.
Fine dining often involves hours of stagecraft, introductions, speeches, concepts and inspirations. You are hyper-managed for a few hours. Water is curated: still, sparkling, ice, citrus, local, imported, infused, cold, warm, room temp etc.
Not everyone loves this. Some intensely dislike being interrupted or made to wait to hear the life story of a dish, especially if there are twenty of them.
Four times in the last year, someone presented me with a prize hamper of ingredients used throughout the tasting menu. I am meant to inspect this?
Truth be told, I do love this pageantry most of the time, and I can be found almost licking myself at the table like the cat that got the cream.
These meals usually hover between good and sublime amidst a parade of architecturally beguiling food composed of rare, imported proteins served with top-brass bowing and scrapping. The fish is cooked with enough precision to make a Swiss watchmaker pack it all in. Reductions, foams and Pinot Noirs are so light, you would swear they are on Ozempic.
The artistry is admirable, often breathtaking, but here’s the rub.
More often than I care to admit, I leave these dinners and head to the same petrol station Burger King to unhinge my jaw and throw down some small, heavily salted fries. Sometimes, I go to Popeyes.
The takeaway bag unfurls to release the toasty waft of small fries cooked to a golden crust that cracks and collapses on the back teeth. The salt dissolves on my tongue, unleashing a pleasure that races to my synapses.
Am I a philistine or a sentient being? I do not usually do this because I am hungry (although that too). It is because I just want to feel something. Comfort food satisfies places of the human soul that little else can reach. All the prissy, dainty, Herculean accomplishments of fine dining rarely trespass into comfort and joy.
After four or so days of fine dining in Bangkok, we head to Ms Maria and Mr Singh. A restaurant with an intuitive understanding of casual, comfort food, filling the soul with joy.
The restaurant’s premise might be real, might be marketing–might be both: an Indian man meets a Mexican woman and a passionate collision of lust and longing results in what could be mistaken for a colourful treehouse above Gaggan. Yes, Gaggan, by Chef Gaggan Anand, who also owns Ms Maria and Mr Singh.
A cynical eye will wince at a menu that looks like two planets crashing. (I am the cynical eye). Persevere. It is not a menu intended to impress you with trickery and stunts, save for Gaggan’s telltale tendresse for spherified yoghurt–a ruse he leaves like fingerprints over every restaurant of his I visited during my stay in Bangkok.
Here, Chefs Hernán Crispín Villalva and Roshun Kumar amplify the overlap between Indian and Mexican food with delicious results. Chefs Hernán and Roshun steward the kind of food that people want to eat. It’s heart-swelling cooking, full of power and demands both a beastly cold beer and the kind of jokes you can only say around close friends.
Alchemists Hernan and Roshun cook homely plates of keema quesadillas rippling with spice and armoured with cheese. Pork vindaloo tacos play with pineapple and chillies. A glossy crab curry wades in coconut milk so luxurious; I assume the crab died there by choice.
Gagganites looking for a slice of the namesake’s fireworks and irreverence should keep refreshing the booking site for Gaggan downstairs. Ms Maria and Mr Singh is less Joker Folie A Deux, and more Beetlejuice Does Cinco De Mayo.
The balcony is dipped in a retina-shakingly vibrant blue, while the interior is warmer, homely and familiar, especially if you grew up with an orange Lego-like skeleton at the table. Those same tables are tiled and then laid with mismatched serving plates and that wood-steel cutlery you so often see in pubs.
It paints an illusion that the decor was unintentionally scrabbled together, but in that attentive, designer-led way–and it works. Ms Maria and Mr Singh is a place for shorts, t-shirts and summer dresses. You don’t need to worry about getting too loud or being a bit sweary. It’s for people who want to let their bellies out and munch crispy okra and onion bhajis while sommelier Milan Rukavi pours natural wine from Italy, France and Austria.
We eat pleasing, brisk, dry-aged hamachi ceviche with finger lime and coconut milk. Papadums and sheet-thin vegetable crisps scoop creamy guacamole spiked with mouth-puckering tomatillo. Pearly Hokkaido scallop ceviches, dainty papdi chaats and pani puri with pomegranate and herbaceous tamarind waters.
Before we leave, the team assembles sharing plates of sugar-coated churros with toasted sticky rice ice cream and totemic slabs of pistachio tres leches, which blink and disappear despite our feeling like we could not eat anymore.
Ms Maria and Mr Singh, Would I Return?
I would absolutely come back if I found myself back in Bangkok and within half an hour of the restaurant including traffic. As fun as it is, Bangkok traffic would put me off a lot of excellent places and the city is already spoiled for choice.
Ms Maria and Mr Singh, Who Should Come?
Large groups looking for something casual, friends catching up, couples looking for date nights or solo diners looking for atmosphere.
Ms Maria and Mr Singh, How Much Is It?
(Keep in mind that we were a group of ten. A tasting menu for two is also available for 6000 baht ($166)).
Papdi chaat, 590 baht for four
Pani puri, 590 baht for four
Ceviche cold curry scallop, 420 baht
Ceviche Ms Maria and Mr Singh, 580 baht
Guacamole, 370 baht
Keema Quesadilla, 350 baht
Pork vindaloo tacos, 350 baht
Chicken tikka masala, 590 baht
Gaggan’s crab curry, 820 baht
Southern fish curry, 690 baht
Mr Singh’s chicken biryani, 390 baht
Ms Maria’s dal, 320 baht
Pistachio Tres Leches, 380 baht
Churros, 320 baht
Chocolate tart with fig ice cream, 420 baht
Ms. Maria & Mr. Singh, 68/2 Soi Sukhumvit 31, Khlong Tan Nuea, Watthana, Bangkok 10110, Thailand. Visit Ms Maria & Mr Singh’s Website or call +66916986688 for more information.
Liam was invited to Ms Maria and Mr Singh as part of a press trip to Bangkok. You can follow
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Seems like such a fun place. How easily transferable is the humble Pani puri?
You had me at Hokkaido scallop curry ceviche. Also, I am an admitted fine dining type, and you can never pry Mackers from my hands.