It has been a while since I last made a post but in this time we have decided to spend more time in Asia to travel and experience as much as we can... not only food wise but of course...
We chose Penang in Malaysia as our base and at some point I will write more about Penang but for this post will concentrate on a weekend we just had in Thailand, based around Hat Yai, the biggest town in the south of Thailand. The reason was tennis so we stayed at a sports resort that had tennis courts but spent dining time in Hat Yai which is the context of this post.
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| The full itinerary. Hat Yai to Songkhala is at the top |
On the day we left the resort and before we checked into a downtown Hat Yai hotel called Lee Gardens Plaza (awful incidentally), we drove out of town and headed... well wherever. It turned out to be northish according to Google Maps and towards Songkhala proper. Took about 30 minutes all told. Maybe more but not much.
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| Sirada Restaurant |
The restaurant was on the lake shore and overlooked a multitude of fish farms which are very numerous in Thailand. The menu unsurprisingly was local and 100% devoted to seafood. As not very many tourists come this way, the clientele is mostly Thais and local Asian tourists as in fact we were, from Malaysia.
Given that there were 40 of us, it was 10 to a table and one person or maybe two took it upon themselves to order the dishes. Typical of Asia is that the dishes arrive when they are ready, not necessarily in order so we had them as they came... which was totally fine by me of course. One of our table took it upon himself to make sure we didn't run out of Tiger beers so we had plenty to keep us occupied.
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Appetizer: fresh betel nut leaves wrapped into cone shape if you can then stuff noodles, dried shrimp, peanuts, anchovies, chillies inside and pop the whole lot into your mouth. Mass of flavors
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| Small shrimp drying in the sun. Much of the chilli here uses dried shrimp as a base |
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| Grinding spices freshly |
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| Deep fried fish |
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| Grilled squid with lots and lots of chillies |
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| Fresh greens sautéed with garlic |
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| Scallops and asparagus |
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| Omelette with chili |
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| Fish stew stuffed into coconut. Lots of different fishes plus of course chili |
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| Deep fried minced shrimp rings... really good! |
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| Piece de la resistance... steamed fish in broth. Eat with rice. Think this is fresh tilapia |
What a feast! I certainly didn't need any dinner that night... but of course just had to. But that's another story.
Best thing was steamed fish, fried fish and the fried shrimp rings. Worked out to be 500 baht per head including quite a lot of beers... approx $15 USD per person. Try and find that in San Francisco!
