Esan Bar

A great local restaurant in Phuket Town

Esan Bar, despite calling itself a bar, is an excellent and affordable Thai restaurant serving Isan food from the northeast of Thailand. The restaurant sits by the busy roadside on the outskirts of Phuket town, near the stadium and not far from the well-known Central Phuket Floresta Shopping Mall.

The restaurant is beautiful and is mostly open-air because it has no walls, only an immense thatched roof. Customers can sit at large wooden tables under the roof or in the garden at circular tables made of recycled wood cable reels with stools around. On another side of the garden are fun bamboo huts where four people can sit comfortably and enjoy the end of the day in a garden atmosphere.

What to order:

As the name Esan Bar instantly indicates, at least to those familiar with Thai food, the food is from the region of Isan, a vast province in the northeast of Thailand famous for its excellent food. Isan food often consists of delicious marinated grilled meats served with sticky rice and that spicy green papaya salad called Som Tum.

We ordered quite a lot but had no problem eating it all. The food at Esan Bar was delicious and met our expectations of Isan cuisine: Soop Naw Mai (spicy bamboo shoot salad), fried duck beaks, fish steamed in salt crust with seafood sauce and served with cold rice vermicelli (200 baht), and crispy pork.

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