Monday 4 May 2026

Good morning Bangkok. Happy Monday and Happy Coronation Day.

Today is a national public holiday marking the anniversary of King Rama X's coronation in 2019. Government offices, banks and schools are closed. Most malls, cafes and restaurants are open as normal.

🌡️ Weather: 30-37°C (86-99°F). Hot and mostly sunny through the afternoon with isolated thunderstorms possible from around 3PM onward. TMD has warned of gusty winds and hail in some areas of upper Thailand today and tomorrow. Morning is the clean outdoor window.

🌫️ AQI: 98-160 (Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups to Unhealthy). Elevated across the city again today. Mask recommended for any extended outdoor activity. At the upper end, outdoor exercise is not advised. Children and elderly residents should limit time outside during peak afternoon hours.

The ceremony was held in Hong Kong earlier this year, and the results confirm what the city's food community has been saying for a while: Bangkok is not just competing with Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul and Singapore, it is outpacing all of them. Nine Bangkok restaurants made the top 50, compared with seven from Tokyo, six each from Hong Kong, Seoul and Singapore, and five from Shanghai. The Bangkok entries include Gaggan at number 3, Nusara at number 5, Sorn at number 12, Sühring at number 18 and Le Du, among others. Chef Thitid "Ton" Tassanakajohn's Nusara, which he opened in 2020 alongside his brother and named after their grandmother, has become one of the most watched restaurants in the region, with its hyper-colourful blue swimming crab curry now one of the most recognisable dishes in Asian gastronomy.

What makes the achievement distinctive is the range. The nine restaurants span progressive Indian, modern German, Southern Thai, refined Thai, and molecular cuisine, representing a depth that no other single city on the list matches. Bangkok's dominance is not built on one cuisine or one style but on a food ecosystem that supports genuine diversity at the highest level. The DestinAsian "Best City in Asia" win and the NPR expat migration story we covered last month told one version of this story. The 50 Best list tells it from the kitchen.

Bottom Line: For anyone who moved to Bangkok partly because of the food, this is the data that confirms the instinct. Nine of Asia's 50 best restaurants are within Grab distance of your apartment. No other city in the region can say that, and the gap appears to be widening rather than closing.

Nation Thailand reported today that demand for international school places continues to rise despite GDP growth at its weakest in three decades, driven by two distinct forces converging at the same time. The first is wealthy Thai families increasingly choosing to keep their children in Thailand rather than sending them to boarding schools in the UK, US or Australia, citing cost, safety concerns and changing global conditions. The second is a growing community of skilled foreign professionals from CLMV countries (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam) as well as Russia, Ukraine and China, who are arriving in Thailand for work and bringing families that need English-medium education.

British curricula dominate the Thai international school market, followed by American, International Baccalaureate and Singaporean systems. Annual tuition ranges from ฿500,000 to ฿1.2 million depending on location and facilities. The sector is expanding beyond Bangkok into Phuket, Chiang Mai and Pattaya, where expat density is highest and long-stay foreign residents are concentrated. The International Schools Association of Thailand confirmed that teacher-to-student ratios typically sit at 1:8, a figure that compares favorably with most Western school systems.

Bottom Line: For expats with children or planning families, the practical takeaway is that Bangkok's international school market is deep, competitive and getting better resourced every year. The broader signal is also worth noting: the same forces driving the NPR and NHK expat migration stories are now showing up in school enrolment data, which means the inflow of foreign residents is not just digital nomads and retirees. It increasingly includes families putting down roots.

Khao means rice, and the name is the thesis. Khao Ekkamai holds a Michelin star for doing something that sounds deceptively simple: taking the fundamentals of Thai cooking, the rice, the curry paste, the balance of sour, sweet, salty and spicy, and executing them with the kind of precision that makes you reconsider whether you have ever really tasted a Thai curry before. The restaurant is built around premium ingredients sourced with genuine care, and the curries are the anchor of the menu, praised consistently for a spice balance that reviewers describe as unusually exact. This is not the style of Thai fine dining that reinvents or deconstructs. It is the style that takes what already exists and removes every flaw from it until what remains is the best version of itself. The space on Ekkamai Soi 10 is intimate without being cramped, the service is warm and knowledgeable, and the pricing sits significantly below Bangkok's tasting-menu tier while still delivering a genuine Michelin-starred meal. On a Monday evening when you want something that feels special without requiring three weeks of advance planning, Khao Ekkamai is the call.

TIP: The curries are the thing to order. Go with two people minimum so you can share across multiple dishes. Reservation recommended but not the multi-week wait of the top-five restaurants.

(Confirm times directly before heading out.)

Have a good Coronation Day.

— Devon