Bang Po Seafood restaurant, Bang Po

Bang Po Seafood restaurant

Is funnily enough located in Bang Po, on the main road between Maenam and Nathon, just before you reach the hills leading into Nathon.

There are a few seafood restaurants along this stretch of road and a few others call them selves also Bang Po something seafood. The 'real one' can easily be recognised by the amount of cars parked in front of it, along the road, since loads of (well off) Thais like to eat here. It looks similar to the picture below.

It's one of the few restaurants on Samui where real Samui food is still served, like Sabeinglae in Lamai. In March 2013 this restaurants was mentioned as one of the 20 best seafood restaurants on the world here.

It's been a few years since we've been here, my wife was really keen on coming out here so I gave her the pleasure. I'm a bit more reluctant in visiting, since out of the 3 times I had dinner here before this week, twice I got felled by food poisoning. Once from an oyster, which basically killed off my interest in said shell food and once from a typical Samui style Octopus soup with coconut. A soup I usually only see served at local weddings.

The food poisoning is something I experience about once a year, unfortunately I had it twice from this place, very rare.

It was time however to call the past the past and give it another try. The restaurant is well known and a lot of people rave about it. What I really liked about it is the fact that part of the restaurants tables are set up on the beach, so the kids can run freely and get themselves turned into little sandmen. Bring spare clothes!

You can also sit inside, there are plenty of tables set up there as well. We had a beautiful star filled sky though and thoroughly enjoyed the view over the ocean.

Down to the food, above is a typical Bang Po seafood specialty, Kapi yaang, a barbecued shrimp paste. That it's BBQ'ed is special about it. It's however not to my liking but my wife loves it and even my 6 year old daughter dug in seriously, although it's slightly spicy.

We also had Tom Yam Kuung, a spicy shrimp soup, which was rather nice, a Chu Chi Pla, a curried spicy mackerel, which we all found a bit too 'ground' tasting and a bit disappointing. The BBQ'd squid was nice.

The above pictured fish was excellently deep fried, a Plaa Jalamet or Pomfret an excellent tasting fish which they got done very well!

All in all though, I wasn't too impressed with the whole experience and especially considering how long we have to travel to get this restaurant, I don't feel it's worthwhile although the space for the children on the beach is nice. For the food I prefer Sabeinglae in Lamai, better quality for the same price and a similar distance to travel for me.

Oh, just for the record, I didn't get food poisoning this time around!

Camille