Funkytown in Bangkok offers the city’s most unrepentantly wild cocktail experience yet, where climbing four flights of stairs is just the warm-up for a cocktail programme that reads like a chef’s tasting menu gone deliciously rogue.
Bangkok’s cocktail scene has never shied away from the wild and wacky, but F*nkytown might just be one of its most audacious bars yet. Tucked atop a multi-storey Chinatown shophouse on Sukhumvit 37, F*nkytown — or Funkytown — is a fever dream of a cocktail bar, one that’s less about ordering a safe Negroni and more about deep-diving into a menu that reads like a chef’s tasting menu in liquid form.
Once you manage to trudge up four excruciatingly floors, that is. We’re already gasping for breath halfway, questioning whether any drink could possibly be worth this climb.
Gladly, it is.
First opened at the end of 2023, Funkytown embodies the new wave of gastronomic cocktails sweeping the globe — drinks that are inspired by and designed with the meticulous technique and ingredient complexity that progressive chefs employ.
Their cocktails are shamelessly brazen. The menu? It’s laid out like a provocative dare, the cocktail equivalent of Fifty Shades of Grey.
The whole thing runs on what it calls the “Funk Scale”. Level 1 is for cowards — familiar, comforting like a swaddling blanket. You’ll find the likes of a Thai Tea Tarik or a reworked Long Island Thai Tea there. Perfectly safe. Very friendly. A gentle caress. A teasing stroke.
But the real fun begins when you let the place slap you around a bit. Or let it tie you up. Because by Level 5 the training wheels are off and you’d be careening through Chatuchak market with all its wild, exotic sights, smells and flavours.
There’s the Durian Colada, which takes the humble Piña Colada, clarifies it, and spikes it with the fruit that famously smells like Satan’s sock drawer. The Som Tum? It remakes Thailand’s incendiary papaya salad as a sweet, sour, spicy gin sour — a drink that actively dares you to admit you’re enjoying it.
It only gets more unhinged from there. Khao soi as a drink. Tom yum soup with a heady splash of gin. There are even drinks inspired by shakshuka and, most bafflingly, roast chicken.
You might cry out to stop. Some will beg for more.
The food at Funkytown is committed on a similar scale. An entry-level Scallop Crudo Tart that pays homage to Singapore’s kueh pie tee. A Bone Marrow Canelé that’s almost as rich as Bangkok’s elite with cash to splash. Naem-stuffed Chicken Wings, because the chicken wings needed some funky fermented pork sausage as a secret password to enter the bar.
The Crispy Pig’s Ears with its accompanying fermented durian sambal? Pair it with the above colada, for those who don’t mind losing friends over your breath.
It sounds all irreverent and fun. Yet there’s something deeply admirable about Funkytown. The bar is not just being weird for weird’s sake — though I suspect it definitely enjoys that, too. It’s really part of a new breed of cocktail bars treating drinks like dishes: gastronomic, complex, layered, and very, very local. This is a sign of Bangkok’s cocktail scene hitting its stride, swaggering into the global conversation… and then flipping the table while it’s at it.
So maybe it’s no surprise Funkytown has already made it onto 50 Best Discovery. It’s brash yet thoughtful, often ridiculous, and occasionally brilliant. A bar you don’t visit just to get drunk, but to think about what you’re drinking — and maybe wonder whether Bangkok is on the verge of taking over the mantle of Asia’s best cocktail capital, one bonkers cocktail at a time.
F*nkytown
Address 1, 39 Sukhumvit 37 Alley, Khlong Tan Nuea, Watthana, Bangkok 10110, Thailand (Google Maps link)
Opening Hours 5pm to 12am daily
Tel (66) 63 845 1844
Web www.fnkytown.bar
Facebook fnkytown.bar
Instagram @fnkytown.bar
Reservations book here
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