This week I am

eating my way around some of Bangkok's top restaurants. There's great eating here, from street food to top restaurants, and what's striking is the range of top places. Joel Robuchon's Atelier http://robuchon-bangkok.com opened on the fifth floor of the Cube building about seven months ago, and it's been a bit ever since. Robuchon attracts Michelin stars the way celebrations attract champagne. L'Atelier (it means workshop or studio) is boldly black and red, divided into a huge bar area that looks into the kitchen, and a more sedate dining room, along with a couple of private rooms. The French do wow! factors really well. This place is dramatic, elegant, and the details nearly perfect. (The wall of greenery is actually a wall of plastic greenery.) The crockery (Bernardaud) is beautiful. So is the basket of breads, individual rolls, including a layered squid-ink bread. Highlight dishes? No low-lights, but I did love the avocado crab roll: fine slices of avocado rolled around crab, on a rectangle of fine grapefruit jelly. Lovely to look at, even better to eat.nahm was where we began. http://www.comohotels.com › Home › Dining › nahm  That's the great David Thompson, Australian-born authority on Thai food. The restaurant is housed in the Como hotel, understated restaurant, lots of textures - like the food. Textures and plays of flavour, wonderful use of chilli and herbs.Interestingly, most top restaurants in Bangkok are housed in hotels or residences. A bit like Singapore or Hong Kong. The favourite restaurant for me is Savelberg http://http://www.savelbergth.com/  Henk Savelberg is a Dutch chef, all of whose restaurants in Holland have been awarded Michelin stars. Then he decided to move house, and he opened in Bangkok at the beginning of this year, at the Oriental Residence. The restaurant is on two levels - three actually. The basement is the kitchen area, the ground floor is the restaurant, and on the first level there are two private rooms and a wine lounge that's open from 6pm to 8pm daily except Tuesday. Lots of striking things here: contemporary Thai artwork, and lots of light. The restaurant has big windows that look out on to the street, so with the street light and the bright clear colour scheme (mainly white, a little cream and grey, and orange), everything looks fresh and cheerful. The food is much the same. What's so lovely about it is the immediacy of the flavours, and a sense of play in the dishes. One of the dishes was composed of grilled langoustines and tomatoes, with a tiny square of Pata Negra, with a couple of leaves. Nothing much? Ah, but the tomatoes (peeled of course) were of various shapes and sizes and included a finely chopped tomato salad and a sorbet. It tastes like a tomato party to which the langoustines had been invited as special guests. It would have been a great party even without them. One of the people at the table said he was thinking that the tomatoes needed salt, then he ate the Pata Negra (Spanish cured ham) and got exactly the salt he wanted.Among the other dishes was North Sea sole with a wafer on which rested tiny mushrooms, and sprinkles of yuzu, flowers, and so on, with a cream of fresh green peas. He has a gift of making a dish taste good all the way through, and making each dish build on the previous one, so that a meal is not just a collection of dishes, but a constructed flavour balance. It tastes like food created by someone who loves eating as much as cooking.Sunday lunch is one of the treats at the restaurant: five courses and a half bottle of champagne, 4000 Baht plus taxes. It works out to about A$170, which I reckon is some of the best value around. Try finding a meal of this quality in France. Or Singapore, if it comes to that. Or most other cities. It is open for lunch and dinner every day except Tuesday.It was a big decision, to move to Bangkok. Chef Savelberg said he thought there weren't many top French-style restaurants in Bangkok, but when he got here, two others had just opened. L'Atelier was one of them.