New Delhi, Nov. 1 -- With its mix of countless street food stalls that mushroom in the evenings with fold-up tables and stools and high-end Michelin starred restaurants, there is no other city, except for Mexico City perhaps, that offers the range of eating options that Bangkok does. Plenty of cultish hype abounds as well. There's a restaurant with a billboard of a chef who has appeared on a Netflix series, another with a bar menu with mostly baffling headings such as acid and expression gins. When I saw a to-let sign for a shophouse, which declared it would make the ideal "Portuguese-styled shophouse bar", it seemed to mark a peak of the Bangkok shophouse trend.

At the acclaimed Opium Bar, for instance, one climbs up several flights of ...