Bo.Lan

Bo.Lan is a Thai restaurant in the Thong Lo area of Bangkok, run by the chefs Duangporn Songvisava, known as Bo, and her husband Dylan Jones. Its name joins their two first names and sounds like the Thai word for classic, which suits its old-style Thai cooking.

The two met in London in the kitchen of David Thompson’s Nahm, where Songvisava was a chef de partie and Jones a sous chef. They moved to Thailand together and opened Bo.Lan in 2008, in a house built in the style of an old bungalow. Songvisava had trained in Australia at Griffith University, the University of Adelaide and Le Cordon Bleu, and she drew many of her recipes from old Thai cookbooks and from talks with farmers.

The restaurant follows slow food ideas. Ingredients come from small farmers and artisans whom the chefs visit themselves, and the kitchen has its own vegetable garden, solar panels and water filtration, and it recycles its waste. Meals are served as a long set of dishes to share, with curries, relishes, soups and salads balanced as a Thai family meal would be, and the wine list includes young Thai wineries.

Bo.Lan closed during the pandemic, served guests at occasional dinners for a while and fully reopened in December 2023. The couple also ran Err, a casual restaurant of Thai drinking food, and hosted pop-up dinners in New York and Hong Kong. Songvisava was named Asia’s best female chef and the Netflix series Chef’s Table gave one of its episodes to her, and she has taught Thai cooking at Thai universities.