Content area
Full Text
Phuket promises a date with dream dining
Our lunch menu, consumed over two days and seven hours in Phuket, puts the epic into epicurean. I blame Vorasit Issara, known to all as Wan, for the excess. He is obsessed with eating, like many Thais, but I have rarely met anyone so focused on food. It's as if he experiences the world most keenly through his sense of taste, rather than sight or sound. He doesn't just consume food, but cooks it, talks about it, researches and perfects. He has cooked for a Thai prime minister and catered an ASEAN Plus Six summit, and now oversees all the food and drink (and music) offerings at his family's dazzling Sri Panwa, a 16ha jungle resort with vast views over the Andaman Sea, perched on Phuket's southern tip. (His official job title is managing director.) Wan knows Phuket's restaurants probably better than anyone. So I lure him to lunch. Twice. The first is a late one at Hong Kong (22 Ratsada Road, Talat Yai). They keep the place open for us (Wan is a VVIP) and unleash a flood of wonderful dishes such as steamed stonefish, its snow-white flesh bathing in a pool of soy and ginger; firm, sweet mantis prawns showered in golden fried garlic; king prawn steamed with soy, pickled garlic and glass noodle; crab of some description; prawn heads in ''Maggi" (soy sauce). A lot of prawns, come...