It’s a Sunday afternoon and my friend meets me at the Ratchatewi Sky Train stop. She wants to take me to this novelty café she’d heard about – “It’s meant to be super cute!” she tells me.

I’m not someone who is regularly swayed by public displays of wanton cuteness, but I was going to keep an open mind. As we got to the café, there were some clues as to what lay inside – plastic, manga-style cat models, walls full of child-like doodles and excited squeals coming from inside.

I peeked through the window, and even my jaded, seen-it-all, post-modern, end of times western eyes found it hard not to be completely charmed. Inside the café were these enchanting little creatures, running around, eating from bowls, preening themselves and generally being as adorable as you can imagine. I watched them play and eat and show off their multi-coloured coats and revel in their little toys and accessories. I couldn’t wait to get inside and among them, and a minute later, we were called in to be seated.

As we walked through the dining room, they shifted and stirred, some of them curling their legs up, squirming around, making way for us to sit down. Some of them were close up to our table, some in far corners...basically everywhere you looked, there was yet another and another, each more outlandishly adorable than the last. It was hard to know where to look. They made the sweetest little noises as their food came out, and I just wanted to take them all home with me, pinch their cute little ears, have them nibble on my fingers, and watch them as they ate their kibble with heartbreaking delicacy.

It’s no wonder they’re so universally loved, with their endearingly aloof air, their loveably quirky behaviour and unknowable ways – awwww, wook at you, sidling up to the table….what’s that you’re trying to say to me? Awwwwww…I don’t know what you want, I REALLY DON’T, but you look as cute as hell trying to tell me. What is it you want, you adorable little creature, you? What is it? Whadda ya waaaaaant? Is it this toy? Is it? Do you want to play? Do you? What’s that? Oh, you want to take my order? Fair enough.

Yes, there really should be more cafes full of Asian people. I could stay all day just watching them interact and play with cats. Oh yeah, there are cats in this café. I forgot to mention that. They were pretty cool too. Not sure how hygienic that can be, but they served decent coffee, I guess.

Shandy Pockets just arrived in Bangkok and rolled up to stay at their perennial base of operations, Aloft Hotel, which is on colourful Soi 11 in Sukhumvit. As well as being a solid Bangkok hotel, it always had the added bonus of looking over the weird space egg that was one of our favourite eating spots, Bed Supper Club. If Apple made restaurants, they would look like this, a none-more-white pod that somehow plopped down in the middle of Bangkok and started serving food and drink in between its avant-garde performance art shows.

Sadly, there's a giant iPod-shaped hole where BSC used to be, it having been demolished in our absence. This makes us sad as we were very much looking forward to eating squid-ink pasta and drinking bellinis while children in shark costumes danced their interpretation of Romeo and Juliet or whatever their next intra-meal show was going to be.

We've been here a number of times, and it's never been the same. For starters, it's all white exterior pervades the inside, too. Two white floors of dining space surround the central 'stage'. The dining spaces are large beds, and you recline to receive your food, so it kind of feels like brunch on the space shuttle. I can't remember there ever being a menu. Things just kind of arrived, delivered by models in utilitarian overalls like they've been forced to work in a space quarry for being too good looking.

As you reclined and ate and spilled almost everything that came along, situationist art happenings began to take place. Artists zip-lined from the ceiling, or silent dancers moved to an unheard beat or costumes were handed out to illustrate various ages of peace. On one occasion, my friend Ariel and I were handed lab coats and headphones as we entered, and we had to sit in absolute silence for about an hour, only being allowed to communicate via pen and paper or making patterns in the dry rice they'd put out. I know, I know, it sounds hipster-level pretentious, but it always felt like there was  a self-regarding humour to it and it was never annoying. If anything, it was worth watching the actual models who would turn up and be baffled by everything happening around them.

It was one of the first places I wrote about as a travel journalist, and never seemed to lose its creativity in the decade I went there. RIP, Bed Supper Club. I'm going to tell myself you just fired up your engines and took off.

Shandy Pockets recently ate its own weight in southern food and came up with this list of the best new restaurants in New Orleans. It's a hard choice, narrowing down the best culinary experiences in this town of food experts, but you know what? We're troopers, and we care about informing YOU, the reader. We're like martyrs to the cause, and if that cause involves high end restaurants, then it's hardly our fault now, is it?

Here's our list, written for our friends over at Zagat: 10 Hottest Restaurants in New Orleans