Today's lunch was taken at, and I quote, Butterfly The Studio cafe. A bizarre name in many ways, as there was no discernable studio, and the place is more a restaurant than a cafe.
We ordered tom kha kai, a dish that's pretty much tom yam with coconut milk:
Despite not looking like the picture in the menu, this was really quite good, even more so because we almost never order this dish (I don't care for chicken, she doesn't care for coconut milk). It was pleasingly sour, with a healthy dose of everybody's favorite aromatic root, galangale (the khaa in the name), and with none of the cloying thickness of too much coconut milk.
The star of the meal was plaa muek phat khai khem, squid fried with salted preserved egg:
Sounds disturbing, I know, but was actually quite nice. The eggs, as the name suggests, are salted, so very little additional salt or fish sauce was needed. And the person who made it flash-fried the squid for just the right amount of time, leaving it tender and cooked, but only just so.
Conversely, the weakest dish of the day was khanaa phat nam man hoy, kai lan in oyster sauce:
On second thought, it wasn't bad, but just lacked personality, which ironic, as it's probably the easiest of the three to prepare!
Butterfly The Studio cafe looks like this:
and is located in a open-air shopping center called Plaza Lagoon (no lagoon here either, nor a plaza) in the Wang Hin area off of Soi Sena, northern Bangkok.