FOOD REVIEWS: What Happened to The China House? Chef Fei Gives Bangkok’s Iconic Restaurant a New Identity
Chaoshan roots, Cantonese craft, and a heritage house that finally matches Bangkok’s own Chinese table
A recent trip to Thailand saw me staying in the wonderful city of Bangkok for a whole six days. Although being a regular visitor many times, I still adore the city, and of course, its wonderful food.
I’d tried three wonderful Thai restaurants with friends, had a helping of some street food as well, so I decided on a good Chinese meal before I made the long journey back to London.
There is a particular kind of hotel Chinese restaurant that Asia knows too well: lacquer, roast duck, a room that could be anywhere from Hong Kong to Jakarta. For years,
The house that reopened on 26 August 2025 is a different proposition. Now billed as The China House by Chef Fei, it is built around Chaoshan (Teochew) cooking and refined Cantonese classics, under two-Michelin-starred Huang Jing Hui, Chef Fei, who began in Chaoshan kitchens at sixteen and later directed Chinese restaurants across the Mandarin Oriental group. A year on, the first-anniversary menus of late August 2026 still read as a statement of intent: inheritance, not costume.
That is the hospitality story worth paying attention to. Bangkok’s Chinese food is not a generic “Cantonese luxury” product. Teochew migrants helped set the city’s palate: clear broths, braises, seafood, restraint. Chef Fei is cooking toward that history instead of past it.
The House
Steve Leung Design Group recast the 1,100-square-meter heritage building as what CCO Mai Chongchaiyo calls “contemporary nostalgia”: not a replica fishing village, but the feel of one.
The ground floor is an atrium of burgundy, teal, and wood, with a bar and lounge first, then a quieter tea bar. Red fabric panels nod to abacus beads; custom metal pendants by Thai artist Pin (Saruta Kiatparkpoom) take their cue from the phoenix crown. Jim Thompson textiles and Siam Woodland timber keep the room in conversation with Bangkok, not only Guangdong. Upstairs: the main dining hall, private rooms, salons. The architecture is doing what good hotel F&B design should do: give families a reason to book the room, not only hotel guests a place to eat.
The old Shanghai-Deco glamour is gone. In its place is warmth, vertical timber, marble tables, and a cocktail bar that actually functions as a heart rather than a corridor. Drinks such as a five-spice spritz or green-tea whisky set a pace that is lounge first, banquet second. Service, as one would expect from this hotel, is precise without theatre: plates reset on a glance, tea poured as ceremony rather than upsell.
The Kitchen
Fei’s stated idea is Inheritance of Happiness, family-style plates, shared ritual, flavour before garnish. The menu moves between Teochew markers and Cantonese craft: pickled celtuce cut like jewels and brined for crunch; Teochew-style shrimp rolls; marinated foie gras in the Chaoshan manner; clay-pot eggplant with salted fish; mud crab in black pepper; flax-seed roast Guangdong chicken (the skin thin as paper, the meat scented with Shaoxing and soy); Phuket lobster with garlic; A5 Kagoshima wagyu against chilli heat. Humble dishes, radish omelette, cabbage with dried shrimp, sit next to caviar jellyfish and truffle fried rice without embarrassment.
That range is the point. A restaurant that can only do luxury has no memory. One that can do both has a city.
Lunch was on the menu the day we visited. Dim sum is not an afterthought: har gau at THB 320, abalone-and-pork siu mai at 690, Teochew vegetable-and-pork dumplings at 240, and some extra special black-truffle crystal mushroom dumplings at 380. There’s also À la carte signatures such as the flax-seed roast chicken for about 1,400 the half, and 2,700 the whole. This is grand-hotel Chinese, not a neighbourhood Teochew shop, and it does not pretend otherwise.
The tea bar is not decoration either. White teas, smoked Lapsang, aged Da Hong Pao are poured with the same attention as the wine list. For a hotel group that already owns one of Asia’s great afternoon-tea rooms, that is a smart second ritual: Chinese tea as a pause, not a souvenir.
Why it matters for hospitality
Three lessons sit under the linen.
First, place the cuisine in the city you are in. Teochew food in Bangkok is not a branding flourish; it is demographic and historical fact. A Chinese restaurant that ignores that fact will always feel imported.
Second, the standalone house is an asset, not a leftover. Operators often treat heritage annexes as problem children. Here the annex is the product: two floors, private rooms, a bar that can hold a drink before dinner, a tea room that can hold a conversation after it. That is how a restaurant becomes a family dining room for affluent locals as well as a hotel amenity.
Third, evolution beats nostalgia. China House kept the name and the address and changed the story. Guests who remember the red-and-black years will find a quieter room and a clearer kitchen. New guests will not know there was ever another version, which, commercially, is the win.
A year after the Fei reopening, The China House no longer looks like a Shanghai stage set parked on the Chao Phraya. It looks like what a Chinese restaurant at this hotel should have been: rooted in the migrant kitchen that helped feed Bangkok, finished with the craft the Mandarin Oriental can actually deliver, and designed so that three generations can sit down without anyone feeling they are in a theme. That is not a small thing in a city drowning in concept dining. It is a house, finally, that knows whose table it is.
Where: Heritage House at the hotel entrance, 48 Oriental Avenue, Bang Rak, Bangkok 10500
Hours: Lunch 11:30 a.m–2:30 p.m; dinner 6:00 p.m–10:30 p.m (last order ~9:30 p.m)
Reservations: +66 (0) 2 659 9000 · mobkk-chinahouse@mohg.com
Dress: Smart; this is still the Oriental
Best use: Dim sum lunch for a working hospitality visit; family-style à la carte or a private salon at dinner; tea bar if you want the room without a banquet
Discovering Hospitality Ratings
Ambiance: 9/10
Service: 9/10
Presentation: 8/10
Food: 9/10
Value for Money: 8/10
Overall rating: 9/10
