Rabbit Hole

There is a wooden door on a quiet stretch of Thonglor, between Soi 5 and Soi 7, marked only by a small carved rabbit head. No sign, no queue rope, nothing that announces what is behind it – just the head, low on the door, easy to miss if you're not looking for it. Push through and the reference clicks into place: this is Alice's rabbit hole, reimagined as a three-storey Bangkok speakeasy, dim and velvet-heavy, with exposed brick meeting marble counters and the occasional mural that would not look out of place in Wonderland.

Rabbit Hole turned ten this year, old enough now to count as an institution in a scene that reinvents itself every eighteen months. It made Asia's 50 Best Bars list as early as 2020, ranking No. 31, and has stayed a fixture of the conversation since. The current menu, led by head bartender Noppasate ‘Depp’ Hirunwathit and the Rabbit Hole team, trades the bar's old alphabet conceit for something more travelogue: sixteen cocktails, each one built around a world capital and paired with a crossword clue that doubles as a flavour hint.

Havana arrives as aged rum, salted banana and chaat masala lifted with sparkling wine; Tokyo is a cold, briny thing of gin, nori liqueur, clarified pineapple and wasabi cut with yuzu tonic. Beijing washes bourbon in duck fat and folds in hoisin and five-spice, a drink that reads more like a dish than a cocktail. The Bangkok entry, fittingly, closes the loop on home turf – Thai spirit and rum stretched with a coconut pandan shrub and warm coconut milk mousse, the kind of dessert-adjacent pour you would expect from a city this confident about its own street food.

This year, marking the anniversary, several of the bar's original signatures returned to the list in their first form through the end of April – Mad Hatter, Clueless, and a Smoke Peach Old Fashioned among them – a rare instance of a speakeasy looking backward instead of only forward, and a reminder of how much of Bangkok's current bar scene traces its lineage through this one address.

The drinker this suits: travel-minded drinkers who would rather taste a city than read about it, and anyone who wants a cocktail list with both humour and a point of view. A strong first or second stop on a Thonglor crawl.

125 Thonglor Rd (between Soi 5 and Soi 7), Khlong Tan Nuea, Watthana. Open daily, 7pm-late.