This restaurant and bar offers flavors from America in the heart of Bangkok. If you were expecting plain ole Mac n’ Cheese, then you’ll be pleasantly surprised—try their duck liver pate or the lamb shanks. Downstairs it’s a bar, the second floor is the restaurant and the third floor offers a mini chill-out lounge, complete with its own humidor and selection of cigars. They also have a wide selection of California wines plus a daily happy hour between 5-6pm; it’s a buy-one-get-one-free promotion on all cocktails and local beers.

Circle and Coyote on Convent are owned by the same firm that operates theme restaurants and bars here and in Hong Kong—very successful ones at that. But while Coyote is doing brisk business even during the week, Circle is depressingly quiet on what should be a money-making Friday night. Is this another example of a restaurant suffering from a lousy location? Perhaps. Or it might just be another example of a lousy restaurant. To be fair, we’ve had a couple of decent lunches at Circle. That was some time ago, though, and we would expect the cooks to have improved over time, not the other way around. Instead on a recent visit when we were the only customers in the place (so no excuses that the kitchen was in the weeds), we suffered through a number of dishes that sounded much better on paper than they tasted off the plates—in some cases we would have preferred eating the paper. There are nice touches: (complimentary) amuse bouche (something fried), crisp mesclun greens served with many items (no need to order salad) and creative and often strikingly colorful presentation. We also appreciate the contrast between dishes with luxury ingredients like a light and frothy forest mushroom “cappuccino” with truffle oil foam and grilled porcini mushrooms on the side and more humble, homestyle items like duck liver pate, a poor man’s foie gras that would have been a lot better with the accompanying “chili olive oil croutons” if they hadn’t been so thick and so soaked in oil. This is one of the problems at Circle: There are so many different elements and nifty little twists in the dishes that the guys doing the cooking, who clearly aren’t at the same level as the guy who designed the menu, inevitably get at least one thing wrong on every plate—and too often it is the main ingredient. The crab cakes in the pan-fried crab cakes with cucumber aspic, meclun greens and roasted chili aioli are heavy and lukewarm. The halibut in the blackened halibut with braised artichokes, pancetta, fresh soy beans, cherry tomatoes and warm balsamic vinaigrette is hard and dry. A ribeye steak is served curled on the plate and drowning in way too much chipotle “gravy” for such a small (8 oz) piece of meat. For dessert, “New York” cheesecake with fresh mango is grainy and the plate unnecessarily doused with raspberry sauce on one side and chocolate sauce on the other. One final complaint: You’re given a choice of “still” or “sparkling”—but, according to our waitress, they don’t offer local water at Circle, free or otherwise. We think this is an unjustifiable policy—and maybe even contributes to their bad karma. You know: Like the circle, what goes around, comes around….