The Bamboo Bar is an oasis amid the churning sea of advanced technology, Buddhist resignation, shocking corruption, casual violence, and Western-style sleaze that makes Bangkok every crime novelist's dream. Located by the swimming pool at the fabled Oriental Hotel, where Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and John le Carré all spent time, the bar is one of the few places in town where beautiful women, foreign businessmen, and random tourists can mix with nothing more exotic in mind than downing a few drinks and listening to four Russian expatriates play jazz.
Germaine Krull, a Pacific War photographer for Agence France-Presse who went into business with a mysterious American entrepreneur named Jim Thompson, first established the Bamboo Bar in the 1940s. The pair were joined by such local investors as His Royal Highness Prince Bhanu and General Chai Prateepasen, who helped turn the Oriental into a center of social life in postwar Bangkok. "Ph.D.s from the Hanoi University had painted our walls and repaired our furniture, princesses had sewn sheets," Krull later wrote. The list of guests who have since visited the hotel — and presumably stopped in to unwind at the Bamboo Bar — includes Duke Ellington, Björn Borg, Roger Moore, Herbie Hancock, Audrey Hepburn, Noël Coward, Ray Charles, David Bowie, Roman Polanski, Elizabeth Taylor, Tennessee Williams, Venus Williams, and Mick Jagger, along with an even longer roll call of monarchs and heads of state.
The last time I visited the Bamboo Bar, I sat next to a famous Thai gangster who was wearing a sky-blue suit and sunglasses along with a staggeringly large diamond in his left ear. He and his girlfriend loved the place, he explained, because life in Bangkok can be a hassle and it's nice to sit somewhere quiet with a pretty girl. A young woman from London in a black dress sat and read an Italian fashion magazine near a rake-thin Japanese businessman in a sober navy suit, while a young blond American banker smoking a big Cohiba sat with a gorgeous Thai woman.
Kings from everywhere stay at the Oriental and come to the Bamboo Bar," says barman Sirichai Boonsri, who has been mixing drinks here for 32 years. "I served Pierce Brosnan here one night. He liked it very much." Sirichai invented the Oriental Mai Tai, the London Calling, and many of the other specialty cocktails on the menu, including the Thaijito, a concoction of fresh ginger, lemongrass, brown sugar, and Mekong whiskey that happens to be Brosnan's favorite. Sirichai admits to missing the old bar, which was made of bamboo, but the atmosphere is still suitably tropical, with table lamps shaped like pineapples and wicker chairs covered in leopard and tiger prints.
At the set break I talk to the house saxophonist, Marat Yuldybaev. He tells me that his quartet came to Bangkok from the Urals and has been at the Bamboo Bar for the past 10 years. When I ask him why the band came to Bangkok in the first place, he shrugs. "We were looking for a gig," he says, before excusing himself to go smoke a cigarette.
