mr jones orphanage cafe, bangkok

absolutely a sweet-tooth’s dream and a dentist’s money-maker of a cafe in the siam paragon mall in bangkok – this is a long photo post, so bear with me. but the spread was amazing – I can’t even imagine how many types of cakes and sweets and confectionary were on offer.

it’s very clearly a female-targeted place, and of the young, squealing, one-directioner variety: it’s got cutesy furniture, tiny booths that grown man look squashed in, and of course the sweet-dominated menu reflects it best. but I’ve got to be straight – I recommend this more for the sheer experience than any gastronomic interest; the chocolate cake we did have was rather pedestrian.

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I’m pretty sure no words are necessarily with a visual spread of goodies like this one, so I’ll leave you to it.

this is such a good idea – especially for young children and grown men.

eventually the partner managed to get me to sit (I was flitting about the store taking photos of everything) after he had some time reliving his childhood through the bowl of plastic soldiers, and we decided on the molten chocolate cake and a slice of red velvet (which never arrived, actually).

it sure looked fantastically appealing when it arrived all hot and snowed over with icing sugar, and dolled up with a scoop of vanilla ice cream – but its flavor fell a little short of expectations. the cake wasn’t nearly chocolately enough, and whilst very dark in appearance, had very little cocoa and chocolate flavour. the scoop of rather generically-commercial vanilla ice cream helped to mask the uninteresting cake (so sometimes 1+1 might equal more than you expect) – but either of those two taken on their own wouldn’t have worked at all.

it was also clear to me that the cake had been warmed in the microwave, which I generally don’t go for – but I give them fair praise in that the cake texture didn’t suffer from it: it was a fudgy sort with closely-bound moist crumbs, and the slight drying out at the edges actually provided contrast.

suffice to say it wasn’t nearly inspiring enough for us to chase our slice of red velvet, but we did scrape the bottom of this dish to the end – which probably indicates that it wasn’t all that bad.

I recommend the experience, especially if you’re travelling with a group of women (not the sort that diet and eschew cake – actually, stay away from these in general); it’s worth the photos, the sheer amazement of every sort of cake and pastry you might want to eat, and maybe your partner might just like you enough to sit down while you go a little mad.

Mr Jones Cafe
Siam Center (2F, close to the linkway to the Siam Paragon Mall)
989 Rama 1 Rd
Pathumwan, Bangkok 10330 BKK
tel +66 2-658-11-63
$$: lunch bbq buffet = twenty-eight per adult