Giga Bite and Booze – Two Thong Lor Pubs For The Price Of One

It's not often you get two of anything for free from this site, but this Gig of the Week is the happy exception as it provides for our music-hungry readers two new venues which were so close together and tucked away from the mainstream as to be irresistible as a pair.

You can get to both by heading along Thong Lor Soi 10 or down Ekkamai Soi 10 until you see the tall, garish roadside sign advertising a handful of nightspots and restaurants in a huge cul-de-sac on your right from Ekkamai or on your left from Sukhumvit Soi 55 or Soi Thong Lor. The property is informally known as ‘Thonglor Square'.

Turning up the dusty careworn ‘sub soi' you discover that it is in fact not a sub soi at all, but a huge chunk of vacant real estate with scattered clubs and noodle shops and a massive communal car park.

Furthest in from the main road are two pubs which have been happily side-by-side for three years already successfully attracting the young punters anxious for a bit of live music and a snifter or three.

First up is Giga Bite, a pub with loads of wooden tables, a small stage and a ramshackle bar at one end selling all the usual beers and bits and bobs you might expect at a student-type pub hangout. It's clean and spacious and there are two live acts every night as well as a DJ between, before and after the live turns. The Do Two acoustic duo were on when we arrived for our cold beers and cashew nuts and they sung dreadful Thai classics without a smile and never a word to the small audience.

The menu is about as basic, one sided and unimaginative as you can get and obviously the intent of this place is to get young punters quietly pissed on cheap whisky and to do so without anyone getting rained upon. It is a pub with a pool table too and it does have live music, but if it is atmosphere, joi de vivre and style and better nosh you want, then you have to stagger a few more yards to the left, where you will find the young and trendy in some numbers in a pub just celebrating its third year in business – Booze.

This is a proper pub/club with a squad of real bouncers demanding I.D before you enter and a stylish verandah with its own bar where you can sit and be noticed and get away from the bands churning out the Thai pop inside. And the joint has a respectable menu too, although the 22-35-year-old punters ain't here to eat.