Nong Bua Seafood – Chai Chet – Restaurant Review

Nong Bua Seafood is an institution on the Koh Chang restaurant scene, first opening its doors on White Sand Beach some 20 years ago.

With its wobbly tables and plastic chairs, broken ceiling tiles and shabby loos as a unique part of it charm, it serves up consistently excellent, real Thai dishes at cheap prices, with an army of attentive staff buzzing back and forth from its kitchen ensuring you never wait more than a few minutes for your food or drinks to arrive and deservedly, it’s always packed.

But as of a few weeks now, they have opened a sister restaurant in Chai Chet, named of course Nong Bua Seafood.

It’s an almost identical menu with similar prices but to shake us all out of our comfort zone, they have gone upmarket chic. In the main covered area, brushed concrete walls house solid wooden furniture with cool drop-down lighting, whilst at the back steps lead down to a lovely decked open dining terrace, with separate stairs also heading up to a roof terrace as yet unopened. There’s a wonderful sense of calm about the place, such a contrast to the loud, bustling atmosphere of its White Sand Beach branch.

Location

You can leave the terrace and join the public walkway down to the beach at the southern end, with Klong Prao Resort in the distance on one side beyond a patch of undeveloped scrubland and the boutique resort, Flora i Talay on the other.

Next door, they have also managed to squeeze in a small but very sweet budget hostel, Pajamas, a mixture of rooms and dorm accommodation fronting onto a kidney-bean shaped swimming pool and you can walk freely between it and the restaurant.

Menu at Nong Bua Seafood

At the front entrance, the restaurant lays out the seafood in ice-boats for you to make instant choices on arrival, plates of clams, squid, whole fish, tiger prawns, the usual array, with clearly marked prices.

There were four of us, 2 Thais and 2 farangs, so we plumped for a sea bass and those clams, together with a simple western style pork skewer and baked potato, before being led down to a table on the terrace, still slightly dazed by newness of the whole place.

From the full menu, we supplemented things with a plate of seafood fried with lesser ginger (pat cha) and of course rice.

The Mains

We had ordered the fish steamed in lime (pla neung manao) and it arrived, beautifully presented atop the charcoal burner, accompanied by a separate bowl of additional sauce. This is not a spicy dish and the sauce is in fact more of a soup that compliments the fish’s delicate flavour, giving it a terrific fresh summery taste.

You make the broth using large slices of garlic, a few birds eye chillies, lime, Thai celery and coriander but the stock used is the key. Many kitchens take the short-cut with a cube, which of course produces that very specific stock-cube taste you can recognize anywhere. Here, they had definitely made the stock as thye broth was a deep and rich liquor. So no complaints there, just delicious.

Clams fried in a roasted chilli paste with sprigs of sweet basil is a classic Thai dish known as hoi laa pat prik pao.It’s should be a little sweet, a hint of spiciness but a good helping of sauce is vital – all of which was perfectly executed on this occasrion.

The seafood with lesser ginger (krachai), meanwhile, arrived on a sizzling plate, again very much the Thai way and this did have some kick, as indeed it should. Made properly, as it was here, the chef will throw in fresh green peppercorns alongside the chillies and today we detected too a hint of simple curry powder, a nice addition.

Our waitress, a familiar face from the White Sand Beach restaurant, who is overseeing things, brought us a plate of complimentary watermelon and pineapple to finish things off.

Drinks and Bill at Nong Bua Seafood

Nong Bu has a full well priced bar, but we took things very slowly this time, meaning the our whole bill with a beer, soda and water was just 945bt.

We’ll be back soon.

Menu Tips and Terms

pla neung manao, pla meaning fish, neung-steanmed, manao-lime
taleh pat cha, taleh-seafood, pat-fried, cha-with lesser ginger
hoi lai pat nam prik pao, hoi-shellfish, generic, lai-clam, pat-fried, nam prik-chilli paste, pao-roasted

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