Cuisine of Ko Lanta Island for gourmets. Places for dinner - best restaurants

Most travelers who come to Ko Lanta Island expect something really exotic concerning the local cuisine. It’s believed that people on this remote and mysterious island eat fried grasshoppers, cockroaches, snakes and, of course, with extra hot sauce. In fact, you can easily find typical European, Asian or American dish on Ko Lanta Yai if you’d like to. Yes, we’re talking about burgers, pizza, noodles, sushi, etc. There is plenty of such food, so you can easily eat only this kind of cuisine if you don’t want to eat the local one. However, it’s definitely worth trying the local cuisine anyway.

So, if you decided to go to a local restaurant, think in advance what you’d like to eat, as not every restaurant serves such exotic dishes as fried bugs or something of that kind. And remember, that the myth concerning how spicy local food is is not a myth at all. The main reason for using that amount of hot spices is to prevent any infectious disease. As you order a dish, you can ask a waiter to make it not so spicy. However, a dish still will be really hot, so you can eat it with a cucumber which is served here with a dish just for this purpose. You should also read reviews about this or that café before going there, otherwise, you would spend the rest of your vacation suffering from food poisoning.

There are no knives given in local restaurants, as it’s used only while preparing food. People here usually eat with a fork or a spoon and they use chopsticks only for eating noodles, but not always. There are lots of rice dishes. It’s commonly served here with a really hot sauce consisting of herbs, lime, and garlic. When there is a celebration, people serve rice with about twenty different fish, meat or veggie snacks in small potties. Besides, the locals really love first courses. Here on the island, you can order a pretty simple but very nutritious soup with noodles, meat, and vegetables. There are also several kinds of noodle: from basic wheat or rice to the mung bean one. Copyright www.orangesmile.com

The most popular dish here is, certainly, Tom yum. There is no one universal recipe, people cook it in different variations, so all the ingredients can be changed in proportions depending on the cook’s personal preferences. Still, the base of any Tom yum includes fish sauce, fresh coconut, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, and galangal. The most popular soups here on the island are Tom yum with fish and rice and shrimp soup. There are also lots of varieties of the dish, for instance, Tom yam kha mu with pork, Tom yam kai with chicken, Tom yam pla with fish, and many many others. Another extremely popular dish among the people here is Pad thai – stir-fried rice noodle with eggs, spicy sauces and a bunch of various ingredients. It can be made of chicken, seafood or pork.

Maybe you’d like to try something extraordinary? Then you just have to try Khanom chin nam ngiao – rice noodles served with pork blood tofu, soybeans, and dried red kapok flowers. Carry is another very famous and very hot dish. It’s not a soup as it might seem at first glance, bur chicken with lots of sauces and gravy. Massaman curry includes various spices: cardamom, tamarind, fish sauce, coconut milk, and green curry (which has a really peculiar taste). Moreover, there is a pretty tasty salad consisting of papaya, peanuts, cucumber, beans, tomatoes, dried shrimps, fish sauce, and chili. Moreover, various chicken, pork, and sea-food kebabs are also highly popular here.

If you want to have a quick snack, Roti (a round flatbread with meat or sweet filling) or flatbread with bananas are the perfect options. Local fruit (e.g. durian, rambutan, jackfruit, rose-apples, longan) are necessarily worth trying. If you want to taste local sweets, order mint Chaokuai, Khanom chan made from rice flour and coconut milk, Tako – rice pudding, Sarim - mung bean flour noodles in sweetened coconut milk with crushed ice, or Khanom mo kaeng – a coconut milk pudding with palm sugar and sweet fried onions. As for drinks, you can order juice, the local butterfly pea flower tea or Oliang – a sweet black iced coffee. In case you want to taste local alcohol, buy wine, beer or rum.