There was a time when Doutor, Japanese coffee chain was dominated in every city in Japan before Starbucks. Doutor has now over 800 shops nationwide since 1962. You can smoke, and coffee price is cheap. (A cup of regular coffee price is still Y200 whereas a cheapest coffee at Starbucks is Y290!) Although it depends what you expect from your coffee shop, business people tend to go into Doutor for their coffee price and quickness. Starbucks, since they offer nice and comfortable loung...
McDonalds are always easy hang-out places for youth. Offering $1 menu better appeals them to hang out and chat during their free time! Also, taking an advantage of their 24H open business hours, people tend to kill time on waiting for a first train to go home after all-nighters. (You see many people sleeping, falling asleep, or fixing their make-up in early morning). At the same time, McDonalds are few public spaces with WiFi service, so after they upgraded their breakfast menu ...
Lao Lao hardly seems like a happening place on the verge on serving some of Thailands most creative and wellknown culture-makers, but this local ari afterparty haunt has been quietly serving drunken artists, filmmakers, musicians and trendy types chinese grease and raw shrimps for over 10 years. If you go there at 4 in the morning you re likely to bump into Apartment Khunpa or Slur members or even film director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang. All this celebrity doesn t even seem to be noticed by...
Nerds doing what they do best at the TRUE shop/cafe in Paragon.
TRUE is one of the few brands that have managed to find that subtle, delicate balance between sponsoring cool young people/ artists and not looking too desperate or exploitative. (Tiger Translate is another, see this blog here) When I think of TRUE, I completely forget that it is actually my own mobile network, instead when I hear TRUE I think of that funky cyber-cafe, filled with whizzy-gadgets, and P'Wit...
Left: Shades of Retro. It's so cool it doesn't even have a website, and is tucked away behind a winding alley. Bizarre but fun. Right: Starbucks, naff and cheap-looking. Overpriced cheap coffee while listening to bickering families and screaming fat kids.
Shades of Retro in Thong Lor distirct has been around for nearly 8 years. It's a small coffee shop styled with 1960s kitsch, bean bags, velvet furnishings, half-broken clocks, 70s p...
Lullabar is one of Bangkok's the best kept secrets. It's hidden away in a dark alleyway and is a popular hangout for indie musicians, artists and the more rebellious university kids from Thammasat and Silpakorn. The crowd is mostly local Thai, with the odd 1/500 being a farang slipping in, probably because of its location (a random street between Sao Ching Char and Luang Por Seu) and the closeness of the people who visit. Regular-goers include Ooh (Daytripper),...
Prolific construction of shopping malls in Bangkok echoes that of the building craze in China. Will our shopping malls start to look like the Bird's Nest in China soon?
It would be turning a blind eye not to mention the biggest hangout place in Bangkok, whether you're a hi-society madame with a rock-hard bouffont, a four-eyed booknerd from Chula, a dek-naew who doesn't wake up til midday, a Chinatown satae-vendor....it's Paragon (duh)
In the span of ju...
NoSpace...My Aunt's been complaining about the "wailings" (Wooden Craft ft. Desktop Error)
Bank (minus Yoko) the co-founder of NOSPACE.
Last year I wrote a blog about NOSPACE, a new art-music-drinking-whatever space that my friends Bank (singer of Red20) and the lovely Yoko started. Bank used to plan Nospace's events in a totally spastic nervous way, you'd suddenly receive an e-mail or he'd turn up at the house going "arrr...
This may not be a trend report, but I think I need to report this sad news in dance music culture scene. One of the longest running dance clubs; Space Lab Yellow as known as “Yellow” has officially announced its closing in June 2008. Yellow opened in 1991 and has been hosting not only local DJs also A-list of international DJs from all over the world: John Digweed, DeepDish, Carl Cox… established great dance culture in Tokyo. In the area called Nishiazabu; where Yellow is has bee...
An outdoor screening at Mogwai (photo credit: Nicky Sering)
Mogwai, a café/restaurant and Cinematheque, has become one of the best hangouts for cinemaphiles, filmmakers, and just about anyone who wants a different experience of Manila. It is tucked between BlackSoup (a gallery run by a collective of filmmakers) and an antiques store in the compound called Cubao X (formerly known as the Marikina Shoe Expo) in Cubao, Quezon City.
Inside the cinematheque with beanbags (photo credit: mogwai ...
