The Best German Food I've Ever Had Was in Bangkok
German food is not what you fly to Bangkok for, until it is.
Bangkok has always had a specific kind of confidence about it. It doesn't ask you to take it seriously as a fine dining city. It just keeps producing the evidence until you stop questioning it.
Sühring is part of that evidence. A converted private residence in the quieter residential stretch of Yen Akat, about 20 minutes south of the Sukhumvit corridor, the restaurant doesn't announce itself in the way three-Michelin-star restaurants usually do. No grand entrance. No monument to its own reputation. Just a gate, a garden, and a brass plaque with three flowers pressed into it.
They opened in March 2016. First Michelin star in 2018, second in 2019, third in 2023, making it the first German restaurant in Thailand to reach that tier. As of 2025, it sits at No. 22 on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list. The numbers are impressive. What's more impressive is that none of it shows in the way you'd expect it to
The Chefs
Thomas and Mathias Sühring are German twins who spent their childhood summers on their grandparents' farm, learning fermentation, pickling, smoking, drying, and curing before most kids their age had touched a professional kitchen. That origin is not background detail. It is the entire premise of the restaurant.
The menu is built from those summers, from family recipes, from the specific sensory memory of German food eaten at a table that mattered. What they've done in Bangkok is take all of that and push it as far technically as it can go without losing the thread back to where it started. That tension, between the deeply personal and the rigorously refined, is what makes dinner here feel different from most restaurants operating at this level.
The Restaurant
Sühring is set inside a restored Thai villa in the Yen Akat neighborhood, a residential pocket of Bangkok that still feels like it belongs to the city rather than to its tourist infrastructure. The space has four dining areas: the main dining room, a kitchen table where guests sit alongside the brigade, a glass house with full garden views, and an upstairs private dining room for up to eight.
The garden is always visible. In Bangkok's heat, there is something disorienting about eating this precise, northern European food while tropical greenery presses against the glass on all sides. It shouldn't work as well as it does.
The Menu
Sühring runs a single tasting menu format, 15 courses, no à la carte. The structure follows a loose arc through German culinary tradition, from the lightest and most playful at the start to the most substantial and memory-laden in the middle, then back out through dessert with the same restraint the kitchen applies to everything else.
The menu changes seasonally but always returns to the same reference points: German street food and beer garden culture in the opening snacks, classic preparations from the German larder in the middle courses, and childhood desserts and family recipes at the close. The wine pairing is a separate list built to match, and it skews heavily German. If you want the full breakdown of what was poured that night and why it worked, that's covered separately here.
The Food
It starts with a Radler. Not a full glass, a miniature one, maybe two inches tall, half lemonade and half lager, served alongside an Obatzda, a Bavarian camembert and butter spread pressed into the shape of a pretzel. The combination is so specifically German, and so deliberately casual, that it functions as a statement of intent. This kitchen knows exactly where it comes from and has no interest in pretending otherwise.
The amuse-bouches arrive as four separate preparations. Alaskan king crab in a delicate tartlet, topped with fine herbs and tiny edible flowers. Garden peas with elderflower, served in a small seed crisp cup that looks like a flowerpot pulled from the garden outside. Smoked trout with horseradish, built into a tart that resembles a miniature terrarium. And brathering with dill, a traditional German fried herring, restaged into something so refined it takes a moment to locate the original.
Hokkaido scallops sitting in a buttermilk sauce with pickled turnip, crystal caviar, beechnut, and five-year preserved Buddha's hand. The acid from the preserved citrus cuts through everything just enough. The caviar adds salt and weight without taking over. It's a dish that tastes balanced in a way that only happens when someone has made it many times and knows exactly where to stop.
Labskaus is a Hamburg dockworker's dish historically, corned beef with potato, eaten for centuries by people who needed something filling and cheap. The Sühring version arrives on a thin crisp wafer, plated in small precise portions, finished tableside with imperial beluga caviar. The brininess of the caviar finds something in the beef that makes it feel obvious in retrospect.
The course that stops the table is the Wildpastete. A pâté en croûte built with deer, bison, wild boar, duck liver, lardo, black truffles, and dried fruits, it arrives whole on a wooden board before being sliced and plated. The crust is hand-decorated. The interior cross-section looks like a mosaic. It represents hunting season in Germany, and you can feel the weight of that reference without needing it explained. The flavors are deep and layered, the game coming through cleanly without the bitterness that poorly handled wild proteins tend to leave.
Dry-aged duck, smoked with aromatic herbs, presented first at the table inside a Staub cocotte nested in a wreath of fresh flowers and herbs, then carved and plated. The slice arrives with a deep, glossy reduction and a purple potato tart. The skin has the kind of lacquered crispness that takes days of preparation. The meat underneath is pink and clean.
Spätzle dressed with Lola Montez cheese, thyme oil, Perigord truffles, and crispy onions passed tableside. German egg noodle, the kind that appears in every household from Bavaria to Baden, and the course where the whole thesis of the restaurant becomes clearest. The richness is total but not heavy. The truffle is present without being the only thing you taste.
Turbot with summer squash, zucchini, ossetra caviar, seaweed puree, and mussel. Lobster with white asparagus and brown butter foam, the nuttiness of the butter lingering past the last bite. If you did the wine pairing, this stretch of the meal is where it earns its cost. You can read what was poured alongside both courses in the wine pairing article here.
Dessert opens with strawberry: sorbet, white chocolate ganache, crisped strawberry on top, and a sparkling rosé wine sauce at the base. Light and acidic after the weight of everything before it. The petit fours follow, black forest bonbons, chocolate bonbons with peanut praline, warm madeleines sitting in cocoa nibs, and a German layered chocolate cake in small squares. The meal closes on Oma Christa's eierlikör, the twins' grandmother's eggnog recipe, served cold in small silver cups over ice. It tastes like the end of a family dinner somewhere in Germany in December. At a table in Bangkok, that specificity is the whole point.
The Service
Service at Sühring moves at the pace the food requires without calling attention to itself. Dish descriptions are precise and unhurried. The timing across 15 courses is managed well enough that the meal never feels like an obligation. The team carries the same fluency with the menu's references that the kitchen does, which matters when a dish arrives with a 40-year family story attached to it.
The Receipt
The 15-course tasting menu is priced at approximately 6,500 THB per person, around $180 USD, before beverages. The wine pairing is an additional cost and worth doing. By the standard of what's on the plate and the city it's in, the value is real.
Who's It For
Anyone serious about fine dining who is spending time in Bangkok. But more specifically, it's for the person who wants a meal that has a reason for existing beyond technical achievement. Sühring has a point of view. The food knows where it came from. That's rarer than the star count suggests.
Notes
Address: No. 10, Yen Akat Soi 3, Chongnonsi, Yannawa, Bangkok 10120
Reservations: +66 (0) 2107 2777 or reservation@restaurantsuhring.com
Format: 15-course contemporary German tasting menu; wine pairing available
Accolades: 3 Michelin Stars, No. 22 World's 50 Best Restaurants 2025
Instagram: @restaurant_suhring
About the Author
Kelly Gomez is a creative director who eats well, travels far, and lives with intention. She has sat at tables that required months of planning, flown routes that cross a dozen time zones, and found herself in rooms most people never find. She is precise about what she loves and honest about what falls short.
A WSET Level 2 Wine Certified writer and Advanced Open Water Diver, Kelly covers luxury travel, hotels, fine dining, wineries, diving destinations, and the trips built around them.
Her work reaches a US-based audience of travelers between 25 and 44, with a near-even gender split and a meaningful following.
