Asia Day 36: Phuket 

Photo of the day: Red curry with chicken @ Krua Charifa. Photo credit: Aaron.

It was time for another rest day! We spent most of the day making good use of the co-working space and pool at the hotel.

For lunch, we wanted to give Krua Charifa another try since I watch Mark Wien’s video on it this morning and he made it seem really good. When we arrived, we realized again that there will be no English menu. I just pointed at my phone and the big pots of pre-made curries to order our food. Unfortunately 2 of the 3 dishes Mark Wien’s loved was not available. The only one that was, there was only a bit left. We arrived there past 2 pm so perhaps it was too late. So we each got a portion of the Gaeng Gari Pla (fish curry) with rice. Aaron also ordered a steak of fish on the side to add more to the meal, which worked out at the end since there really wasn’t much fish in left in the curry by the time we got there. I was overall underwhelmed by the curry. Perhaps, by this time of the day, a lot of the key ingredients of the curry were gone and what’s left isn’t much – only some eggplant. The fried fish steak was a bit dry as well. Aaron thought this wasn’t enough food so ordered another red curry. To our surprise, it was a chicken drumstick curry and it was really flavourful! It was my favourite type of flavourful, sweet curry. I love it when we randomly pick great dishes!

I saw a little boy drinking some Thai Milk Tea during lunch, so I really wanted some as well. Aaron found a place across the street from our hotel which is supposed to serve really good milk tea, so we stopped by. They did not seem to speak English and luckily, I learnt how to say Thai Milk Tea in Thai, so I just mumbled “Cha Yen?” and the young lady asked an older lady from behind to come out just to make the tea for me. It did not disappoint and we brought that back to the hotel to enjoy while doing some more work.

It was spitting when we left for dinner, so we just stopped by a cool-looking restaurant around the corner called OOy Street Kitchen. It served both Western and Thai food, so we knew it might not be one of those authentic meals, which was ok with us. When we sat down, they immediately placed the Thai language menu in front of us assuming we were Thai. We politely flipped it over to the English side. I thought I needed a break from those tongue-numbing spicy curries. Aaron felt that the chef here really puts an effort into making good food just by looking at him cook in the open kitchen. Aaron had the Magga Burger and I had the carbonara. Both were nicely presented and tasted pretty good. The bacon in my carbonara, somehow tasted like pepperoni, which I didn’t mind since I prefer pepperoni over bacon. The onion rings with Aaron’s burger was very nice and light. The pulled pork in it was perfectly seasoned with a lovely, tasty sauce. I almost forgot to mention that the mango smoothie here was also very amazing! Almost as good as Five Boy in HCMC!

And that ends our last day in Phuket! I guess this was a nice way to ease into our resort getaway tomorrow!