The Oriental Hotel Cookbook
Published by Editions Didier Millet, 2006

The Oriental reissues its gorgeous cookbook for a reading public hungry for more caramelised duck liver and tales of the rich and fussy. My review for The Nation, published in December 2006.

The Oriental had already scaled the posh heights of fame by 1894, but things change. That year its bill of fare involved “sellery soup” and stewed chicken, which sounds awfully bland no matter how you spell it. Thank goodness things keep changing.

The hotel, venerable long before it felt obliged to start naming rooms after famous guests, was swiftly back atop the ramparts of culinary excellence, and by now no longer seems capable of yielding its tiara. Certainly not with Norbert Kostner in command. He knows how to spell celery, though he much prefers eggplant and mango.

“The Oriental Hotel Cookbook” first appeared in 2000, but has happily been reprinted for the grand dame’s ostensible 130th birthday — “ostensible” since the actual founding year is lost in a seaman’s fog. The Nation just recently received a copy for review and has since been dutifully drooling over its dozens of recipes from Le Normandie, Lord Jim’s, Ciao, the China House, the Sala Rin Naam, the Verandah and even the guiltily healthful items offered by the Oriental Spa.

Coffee-table-friendly and 176 sleek pages long, the cookbook is more of a keepsake, though your own guests at home will obviously be grateful if your feed them its treats instead of just showing them the pictures.

Mind you, Luca Invernizzi Tettoni’s photographs are almost as delicious as the food, even when they’re showing the old rice barge on the river and the even older eaves on the Author’s Wing.

It’s William Warren’s unifying text, though, that ensures the book a vividness even roast pigeon in a potato coat with mustard sauce can’t muster. His storehouse of superlatives refuses to be exhausted through chapter after chapter on the Oriental’s various restaurants and he’s still going strong at the end for an engaging history of the hotel.

Familiar beans percolate in this rich coffee — Dan Beach Bradley and Anna Leonowens’ boy Louis, tsar-to-be Nicholas and Jim Thompson, plus assorted scalliwags and connivers. The Oriental teeters at times but invariably flourishes with fresh coats of paint and reassuring infusions of French savoir faire and German hospitality. Siamese royals pay visits, not least to see Vaslav Nijinsky demonstrate something called ballet.

This is where the expected namedropping kicks in with an understandable smugness, but the extent of the guest list never fails to amaze. We’ve heard often about Joseph Conrad and Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Cartland staying there, and found out long ago that Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward and James Michener had some sort of club for people who get suites named after them in every Asian port.

But then there are Charles and Diana, George Bush the First, Lauren Bacall, Richard Nixon and Andrew Lloyd Webber too. Warren feels compelled to mention a “Mr and Mrs Anybody” as well, but I’ve never heard of them.

I’ve read elsewhere — possibly when I was actually spending a pair of nights in his suite on an ill-conceived but gratefully remembered vacation of my own — that Noel Coward first checked in here in 1925, which would have been right after his first big stage success with “The Vortex”. It was so successful, in fact, that he collapsed on stage performing it, thus discovering he was in need of a holiday, preferably far, far away from London.

Five years later he might have been thinking about Bangkok when he wrote the sentimental waltz “I’ll See You Again” for his play “Bittersweet” and hit the road once more. This may have been the occasion Warren refers to when he recalls Coward being talked into trying a different Bangkok hotel and, finding it “beastly”, grabbing a taxi to his beloved Oriental.

On the 1929 trip he was in Singapore when he had the brainstorm for “Private Lives”, his career capper. At the Oriental, the best he could come up with was this:

In Bangkok at twelve o’clock they foam at the mouth and run,
But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.

Maybe the food was too much of a distraction.

Certainly Norbert Kostner, who’s been the hotel’s chef supremo since 1974, knows about distractions. A generous adviser to His Majesty the King’s rural development projects, he was manning the kitchens for the royal anniversary celebrations this past June, filling the tummies of sultans and serene highnesses with delectables that, but for the sheer weight of the occasion, could have set some crowned heads dreaming.

With the Oriental’s long-time general manager, Kurt Wachtveitl of the gilded greeting, Kostner owns a share of The Legend too. The legend is immense, but this “cookbook” — the word shortchanges its elegance — is a tribute to the dedication of the hotel’s current staff. May they never run shy of truffles.