Bangkok Modern

For a visitor like myself, reimagining Bangkok as a city where one might spend an afternoon sitting in fashionable cafés or gliding through trendy stores—as if one were in New York or London or Paris—requires a major shifting of mental gears, amending the outdated "exotic" images that travel agents still use to lure visitors here. A very good place to make the adjustment is the area around Siam Square, which is home to several department stores and shopping centers, including Siam Center and Siam Discovery Center. Both are crammed with interesting stores representing local and international designers, and with young shoppers scoping them out. Greyhound has a clothing store here, as does Habitat and the trendy Japanese Loft. There seems to be a Starbucks on every corner, and the Au Bon Pain on the ground floor of Siam Discovery Center is always packed.

There are also a number of hotels in the neighborhood, notably the Regent Bangkok, which has been going through a reincarnation of its own. New York-based Tony Chi has designed three gorgeous restaurants for it: Madison, a Manhattan-style steak house; Shintaro, a sushi bar; and Biscotti, where chef Giovanni Speciale prepares wood-fired pizza, pastas, and seafood in a vast open kitchen, surrounded on three sides by seating for diners. The kitchen, where I counted eight cooks on one night, is pure theater, and the food, based on local produce, is sparklingly fresh. I enjoyed it so much that I returned for lunch the next day.

Tony Chi, who was born in China and for the last four years has visited Bangkok monthly, seems to have tapped into the city's cosmopolitan yearnings. Biscotti is worldly, yet encourages a communal conviviality—a combination rarely found in hotel restaurants. Locals decked out in everything from jeans to silky dresses and Armani suits fill it every night. "Bangkok is very sophisticated, not in material things, but in its gracefulness," Chi tells me. "It has a lot of inner beauty—and the potential to become one of the great cities of the world."

The other neighborhood that captures my attention is Sukhumvit, a series of leafy, quiet lanes off a long stretch of busy Sukhumvit Road. The area, which still has plenty of century-old wooden houses, has long been popular with foreigners as a place to both live and play. I've been coming to Sukhumvit for years to shop at Rasi Sayam, probably Bangkok's best source for traditional Thai handicrafts. There are great restaurants out here, too; after dinner, everyone heads to Q Bar, an offshoot of the famous Saigon celeb hangout that closed a few years ago. But now, instead of hiring a taxi to get there—a ride that could take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour—you can make a daily pilgrimage using the Skytrain, which has eight stops along Sukhumvit Road.

An area of rice paddies only 50 years ago, Sukhumvit is now home to the Emporium, the city's newest and most upscale shopping plaza (Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Gucci, and the like). The restaurant Agalico, whose owner is reputed to be a direct descendant of King Rama V, is where ladies who lunch go for afternoon tea. Sukhumvit has also become a boom area for small, chic day spas such as Pirom, Palm Herbal, and Being, all of which offer treatments with a Thai twist, like hot-oil papaya body wraps and a Thai-pepper body scrub.

Day spas, nightclubs, boutiques, restaurants. What happened to the recession?To hear it from taxi drivers and shopkeepers, business is bad, money tight. Khun Puchong, a waiter at the Sukhothai with a college degree in business, used to work at a bank; now, he says, he's lucky to have a job at all. But clearly there are people who still have money to spend, I remark to my friend Tom Van Blarcom, an American P.R. executive who has lived here for almost 20 years.