Greater Bangkok has no shortage of Chinese restaurants where you can get your fill of simple comfort food, but they’re less and less common in the increasingly upscale areas of the inner city. Surrounded by trendy boutiques and slick cafes, the unpretentious Top Menu is a glass-fronted one-room eatery with a low ceiling, bad acoustics, white walls, blindingly bright halogen lights that are thankfully partially recessed, tourist knickknacks, a TV tuned to CCTV and a dozen or so red tablecloth-topped tables. Out of place, in other words. The food is similarly old-school and unsophisticated. The kitchen serves up reasonable interpretations of garlicky pan-fried long beans (B100), pork dumplings (B100), crisp callion pancakes (B60) and braised tofu (B110), but for each dish you can think of a restaurant somewhere else that does it better. We’ve also discovered a couple of items we won’t order again: the chilled sliced beef with “special spices” (BTK) had a slight “freezerburn” taste, which wasn’t improved by a too-generous sprinkling of granulated sugar on top; the Tangpo pork belly (B140) was also far too sweet for our palate—though we should point out that our waitress described it as “very sweet.” Top Menu do a far better job with their selection of herbal soups, pungent elixirs that include, at the high end of the price range, a special broth “for man” (B280) but also more pedestrian offerings (meatballs) starting at B100. Overall, we don’t really think the word “top” is justified, except for maybe the location, but that—and the fact that the kitchen stays open late—is the only reason we’ll continue coming here.