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East Coast, AustraliaFreePhuket, ThailandFreeBali, IndonesiaFreeMallorca, SpainFreeIbiza, SpainFreePhuket · Food & Old Town
Its own cuisine, not generic Thai. And the best free half day on the island.
Where Phuket eats
Phuket cooks Peranakan and Hokkien — trading families from Fujian settled here generations ago and the food never stopped being theirs. There are thousands of places to eat on this island and no short list of famous ones, so we do not pretend there is. The best of it is in a few areas — the Old Town, the markets and the street stalls — and that is what is below. Tell us what you like and we will point you at the right one for your day.
Sino-Portuguese shophouses along Thalang Road, the pastel lane at Soi Romanee, street art everywhere. A free electric shuttle loops the quarter every fifteen minutes from 11am to 10pm.
Congee, Thai sweets and roti mataba among the fresh-produce stalls. The most authentic cheap breakfast on the island, and then it is over.
Buy your seafood from the stalls on one side of the road, carry it across, and a restaurant cooks it. One of the genuinely great things to do here.
It is sold per kilo on the stall’s own scales. Watch the weighing, and settle the cooking charge separately.
Wherever you are staying there will be somewhere within walking distance cooking properly for a fraction of what it costs at home. Pork skewers, pad thai, pad kra pao with pork and egg, grilled seafood.
Thalang Road closes to traffic and turns into 360 metres of food stalls. Go between five and six — by seven it is shoulder to shoulder.
A covered street-food market about a mile and a half south of Bangla, with halal stalls among it. The easy one if you are staying in Patong.
Enormous, and mostly clothing — but the food section is worth the trip on its own.
Shipping-container bars and food stalls on Yaowarat Road, with a mostly Thai crowd rather than a tourist one. Wednesday and Thursday are the best nights.
Dishes worth hunting down: mee hokkien, moo hong, o taw (oyster omelette with taro), oh aew (shaved ice with banana-seed jelly), kanom jeen and a-pong. Opening hours move about here more than anywhere — treat all of this as a strong steer rather than a guarantee, and check before you travel across the island for one place.
What to eat, and where.
Not generic Thai. Phuket cooks Peranakan and Hokkien — the food of the Chinese families who came for the tin mines. Moo hong, hokkien mee, and crab curry with rice noodles.
In the Old Town and the markets rather than any one restaurant. The streets around Thalang Road are full of small places for lunch, Talad Kaset does breakfast, and on a Sunday Thalang Road becomes the Walking Street.
Yes, and it is cooked in front of you, which is more than you can say for most restaurant kitchens anywhere. Go where there is a queue of Thai people and you will not go wrong.
Buy it at the market, then take it to one of the restaurants behind to have it cooked. Go around half eleven, and agree the weight and the price before anything is weighed.
No. Everywhere on this page you walk into.
