As Seen Abroad: Rolling Roasters Ekkamai Bangkok
Please enjoy this post from our travels. We’ll be back to posting Tokyo content soon!
When we plan a vacation, one of the first things I do is search, “Best coffee shops in” wherever we’re going. As I’ve said before, my favorite thing to do is drink a delicious latte or Gibraltar (if I’m lucky enough to be at a place that knows what that is) with my wife while reading my Kindle. Thanks to the spread of coffee culture around the world, pretty much any city we visit has a few fancy-pants cafes serving delicious espresso drinks.
However, some cities make that easier on us than others. Unlike some popular tourist destinations, Bangkok is very spread out, with the popular attractions like the malls and floating markets in completely differnet parts of town. So even though Bangkok had some awesome coffee places like 100% Arabica, they often weren’t within walking distance of wherever we happened to be.
I’d liken Bangkok to Los Angeles, where rush-hour traffic can leave one stranded in a certain part of town, unable to get back to your home or hotel until after 7. That happened to us after visitng some of the malls on the east side of town, but thankfully there was a great place for us to chill.
Rolling Roasters in Ekkamai
Ekkamai is an up-and-coming area on the east side of Bangkok. Ekkamai is known as a hip neighborhood that has a lot of popular eateries, and is a bit more spread out than Chinatown or some of the more packed neighborhoods by the river. Rolling Roasters is a modern-looking spot in a strip mall that looks like something you’d find in most any city, and while it didn’t scream Thailand, it wasn’t short on style.
The location has a big open space, with the bar where you order in the middle of the floor, surrounded by cool seating areas. Upstairs, there was a lot more seating, with plenty of people hanging out and quietly working. My first thought was that they must have spent a ton of money remodeling this space to create the cool lines and open art-museum feel.
Rolling Roasters is definitely popular - while making our iced lattes, the staff was also super busy preparing big to-go (or maybe app-delivery) orders for offices or whoever was getting those big bags of goodies. We ordered and went upstairs to relax after a long day of shopping.
The stylish upstairs at Rolling Roasters
As you can see, the open space in the center means you can watch the baristas work from above and take clandestine photographs of your husband as he waits to get the drink he’s kindly bringing to you. They could definitely fit in more seating if they had a more traditional floorplan, but we really liked the design, and there were many different kinds of seating for people working on laptops, Instagramming treats, or laying back and enjoying the nice quiet coolness of the indoors on a humid day.
How is the coffee at Rolling Roasters?
We had a lot of coffee in Bangkok, so there were several places to compare this to. The lattes here were tasty and cool, but definitely couldn’t compare to the coffee at 100% Arabica, which also had better views. But Rolling Roasters had more seating than 100% Arabica, and was way less crowded. Rolling Roasters was definitely a better experience than Mother Roaster, where the staff was so rude, the experience was awful, despite the fact that they had cute kitties.
Overall, if you’re looking for the coolest coffee experience in Bangkok, go with the 100% Arabica on the 55th floor of Empire Tower. 100% Arabica also had the best coffee we tried in Bangkok, but there are many other places that have great reputations, including some others we tried whose names I can’t remember. I’d say Rolling Roasters could compete with some of these, but Bangkok is all about neighborhoods, so the question is really whether Rolling Roasters is worth going all the way to Ekkamai for.
I would say no, it’s not worth traveling all the way across town for, but that’s only if you’re staying near the river and don’t have any other business on that side of town. We had a fun day checking out some of Bangkok’s best malls like EmQuartier, and we didn’t want to sit in traffic for an hour and a half just to get back to the Conrad Bangkok. So for us, taking the short trip to Rolling Roasters made sense. Unfortunately, we were exhausted, so we didn’t bother to see anything else in Ekkamai, something I plan to correct if we ever get back there. And if we find ourselves on that side of town at rush hour, I’ll definitely want to spend a couple hours chilling at Rolling Roasters.
Where to find Rolling Roasters Ekkamai
Address: Earth Ekkamai, Khwaeng Khlong Tan Nuea, Watthana, Krung Thep Maha Nakhon 10110, Thailand
Phone: +66 96 215 5453
Website: https://rollingbkk.com/
Hours: 7 A.M. - 5:30 P.M.
Bangkok has some incredibly cheap ridesharing services like Grab and Bolt. We used Grab the entire time we were there, and it made getting around much easier since cabs in Bangkok can sometimes be difficult - taxis in Thailand are super cheap, but the drivers never seem to know where anything is, so for us, Grab was worth paying a bit extra for since we could use the app to specify exactly where we wanted to go. I don’t think we ever tried Bolt, but maybe we did - I forget - so try whichever one you want, I guess.
