Red Clam Restaurant in Kathu (Hoi Pai Daeng)

A fun local restaurant in Kathu

Red Clam in Kathu, or Hoi Pai Daeng in Thai, is a local restaurant serving good and simple Thai food, perfect for sharing with your friends at the end of the day, the way Thai food is best enjoyed. The restaurant is modest, but the setting is fun, with a vast open-air garden with open tables and those typical bamboo huts so popular in Thai restaurants. In case of rain, there is also a large covered area in the back.

While it might not win an award in the Michelin Guide, the food is good, and it has the charm of a truly local place. The restaurant decor is quite simple, but the setting is quite creative: half a tuk-tuk with full lights on standing by a bright traffic light in the middle of the garden will certainly catch your eyes right away. This is a fun background for young customers to take selfies for their Instagram accounts and family photos.

Later in the evening, a band played for the guests, but we didn’t stay long enough to see them. The staff is efficient, and while a little cold at first, they help recommend what’s on the menu.

Red Clam Restaurant is located between Patong Beach and Phuket Town, just next to the Phuket Country Club Golf Course. There is vast parking next to the restaurant so you won’t have any parking problems.

What to order

As often, when a restaurant away from the main beaches is full of locals, you know the food must be good. The menu comes with lots of photos to help you choose, and the name of each dish is written in English, so you won’t have any problem finding something that tempts you.

They even serve the strange and not so easy to find Yum Kai Mangda Talay, one of our favourite dishes: a very spicy mango salad mixed with horseshoe crab egg and served in a very weird-looking horseshoe crab shell. It’s worth a photo, as you can see below, and it was really good.

Pak Ped Tod (ปากเป็ดทอด) Deep-fried duck beaks with tongue still inside served with a sweet chilli sauce.

Goong Ob Woonsen (กุ้งอบวุ้นเส้น) Baked prawns with vermicelli. A bit of a Chinese touch but is commonly found in seafood restaurants that serve it with seafood sauce to level up the spice and freshness.

Yum Hoy Nangrom (ยำหอยนางรม): Spicy oyster salad with local greens and shallots. The dish is a mix of everything served to you when ordering fresh oysters at a seafood restaurant. The main ingredients are small oysters, the local green (กระถิน – Kratin — considered a weed on a fence in Latin it’s Leucaena leucocephala ), deep-fried shallots and red chilli jam.

More photos

Local Thai Restaurants in Phuket

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