Karon has one of the most beautiful beaches in Phuket, three kilometres of white sand that never feels crowded even in high season, and golden, dappled sunsets that still stop you in your tracks even when you’ve seen a thousand of them.
You might expect dining to match. At first glance, it does not, and the options are dispiriting: waterfront seafood restaurants that double up as American diners, beach clubs where everyone is too busy preening to care about their supper, and a long stretch of Patak Road lined with places that all seem to serve the same laminated menu. You won’t go hungry, but it’s not quite what you came for on the world’s best island for eating.
But scratch the surface just a little and the picture changes. Hidden up the hill, a dine-on-water steakhouse and a tin-mining-themed dining room have turned a boutique hotel into an unlikely culinary outpost. Down side sois from Karon’s main drag – the one with Russian pharmacies, Nepalese tailors and Irish pubs – you’ll find Isaan som tam shacks and decades-old noodle shops feeding the people who actually live here.
There are a few really capable places to eat in Karon. You just have to know where to look. This is where to look; the best restaurants in Karon, Phuket.
Tanuan Somtam
Ideal for fiery Isaan food set back from the tourist trail…
Sniffing out a good som tam restaurant in the higher ground of a Thai beach town requires a fair amount of intuition, the wisdom accrued from too many throbbing sweet carrot and cabbage versions, and obviously a little luck. Tanuan Somtam is Karon’s best spot for Isaan food, bar none. It might be its only Isaan spot worth your time, quite frankly.
Down a soi on Taina Road, a few minutes’ walk from the beach but a world away from anything aimed at tourists, all the tells of an excellent Isaan meal are here. Blue plastic tablecloths with Doraemon doing his thing. Grab-sponsored bunting and a Coke-branded cutlery caddy. A freestanding fridge you wrestle open to fetch a beer. And, of course, the pok pok pok pok pok that brings on a Pavlov in those who know.
Since you’re here, you might as well go all in, and the som tam pla raa is nicely funky and antagonistically hot. The grilled catfish laap is pasty and homogeneous, just how I like it. Crunchy, too, with big boulders of khao kua hefty enough to chip a tooth on.
A herbal gaeng om tastes like something made from whatever was growing out the back that morning – for better or for worse, it’s a bit of a lottery, which is half the fun. Grilled pork neck arrives with a jaew dipping sauce that carries smoked, round heat – not the performative chilli of tourist restaurants, but a slow, persistent burn that sits with you until the next day.
There is a second branch of Tanuan in Phuket’s Wichit district, which tells you the locals rate it. But you’ve already figured that out by the constant stream of grab drivers picking up pounded salads to go. Someone’s in for a good dinner tonight.
Nominally open every day from 9am to 9pm, but this varies on the whim of the family running the place. You’ll get change for 500 THB (£12.50) here for a huge spread for two.
Address: 17/2 Taina Rd, Karon, Mueang Phuket District, Phuket 83100
The Pad Thai Shop
Ideal for a perfectly wokked pad Thai at budget prices…
Pad Thai gets a rough deal from the culinary cognoscenti, dismissed as too sweet, too cloying, too familiar. This is unfair. A good pad Thai, cooked fast over high wok heat with the right balance of tamarind, fish sauce and palm sugar, is objectively delicious. The Pad Thai Shop on the back road between Karon and Kata has been proving the point for years.
It is not much to look at, which, without wishing to labour the point, is reassuring. A corrugated roof, a yellow signboard half-obscured by plants, a Lonely Planet clipping that looks like a pirate’s map, and various prohibition signs taking aim at clearly one-off, incredibly specific infractions: no dogs in bathing suits allowed, that kind of thing.
To the left, you order at the counter. Behind, the wok station fires away – clak clak clak – and the food comes out when it’s ready, wrapped in banana leaf for takeaway or plated up if you’re staying.
Beyond the pad Thai, the guay tiew gai (chicken noodle soup, this one quite brooding and sweet) is excellent, and there are pots of crushed peanuts, dried chilli and tamarind on every table so you can fine tune your bowl to taste. No more blaming your pad Thai for being too sweet, then.
There’s a secondary operation dedicated to mango smoothies, freshly blitzed to order, which obviously hit the spot too. Most dishes hover around 60 baht, which is impressive value considering how popular this place is with tourists. It is always packed, and the crowd is a cross-section of Karon at its most democratic: stragglers off the beach, solo construction workers, Thai families, all eating the same thing at the same metal tables. Heaven, really.
Cash only and closed Sundays.
Address: 12 3, Tambon Karon, เมือง Phuket 83100, Thailand
CHAR’D
Ideal for the best steak in Karon with the theatrics to match…
Hidden away up a steep hill at the southern end of Karon, the Avista Grande is the kind of hotel you wouldn’t find unless you were looking for it.
It’s worth making the effort. CHAR’D is its evening restaurant, set around a shallow pool in the hotel’s central courtyard where you take your shoes off and dine with your feet in the water. It sounds gimmicky. It is not. A breeze comes in from the sea, the water is cool, and there is something faintly illicit about paddling your feet in a place this polished.
CHAR’D centres everything around a Kopa charcoal grill oven, and the smoke carries across the courtyard before you have even opened the menu. Chef Nair has worked in hotel dining across the world, picking things up and absorbing the global palate along the way, and the menu leans Californian surf-and-turf as a result, with Phuket lobster and imported F1 wagyu cross sharing top billing.
The best thing on the menu is a straightforwardly delicious lobster bisque that shows off the kitchen’s judicious touch. In a rich, deep broth that doesn’t have a hint of the coppery note that plagues lesser versions, crisp bits of grilled lobster are sprinkled over the soup like croutons. It’s both grounding and decadent.
Crispy Phuket prawns with pineapple salsa and a shichimi dressing keep things carefree, as does splashing your dining companion with your feet. An Australian Black Angus ribeye (a cool 2000 THB – £50, ish) boasts wall-to-wall pink, perfect cuisson, and the Phuket seven-colour lobster, grilled whole with a crack of pepper, carries that same charcoal confidence. It arrives at the table in a box, wreathed in smoke with a disco light, somehow managing to land on the right side of fun. A Caesar salad finished tableside feels like the ideal accompaniment.
Chef Nair knows how to get the most out of these premium ingredients, no doubt about it, in a way lacking elsewhere in Karon. Despite the presentation – edible flowers, sparklers, disco lights – there’s an admirable restraint to his cooking.
Then, the shackles are off as crêpes suzette is flambéed tableside with Cointreau, flames licking up in the open air and setting fire to my assertion about admirable restraint. Joy ripples across the open-air courtyard, other diners turning at the fireworks with undisguised delight. I ponder getting caught up in the flames momentarily, and how there’s easy extinguishing within reach. Just dive in.
It is a ridiculous scene, and completely wonderful too. And then your phone falls through the table slats and into the water, and all you can do is laugh.
Address: 38 Soi, Luang Phor Chuan Rd, Karon, Phuket 83100, Thailand
Website: avistagrandephuketresort.com
Read: Where to find the best steak in Phuket
Portosino
Ideal for exquisite views and a Sunday Bollywood brunch..
Portosino is the all-day dining restaurant at Avista Grande, the same hotel that houses CHAR’D, and it operates in a different register entirely. Where CHAR’D is theatre and fire, Portosino is the workhorse: breakfast buffet, lunch, dinner, seven days a week. The interior plays on Phuket’s tin-mining heritage with suspended rail tracks overhead, mine-style lamps and metal-framed partitions, and there is a dessert trolley styled as a mine cart that trundles past your table in charmingly ponderous fashion.
The menu here covers Thai, international and Indian, which sounds like a kitchen spreading itself too thin, but the Indian side of things is what sets Portosino apart from every other hotel restaurant on this stretch of coast. A dedicated ‘Grande Indian Menu’ runs from vegetable samosas and hara bhara kababs through to a lamb shank rogan josh and a Phuket giant tiger prawn moilee – a South Indian coconut curry using local prawns that bridges the gap between where you are and where the spices come from. Both curries are intricately seasoned and generously portioned, and clock in at around 500 to 700 THB, which is in the £12.50 to £15 region back home.
There is a Sunday Indian brunch with a DJ spinning Bollywood, and it has developed the kind of following that fills a hotel restaurant with people who do not stay at the hotel.
The Thai side of the menu is worth paying attention to as well. A dedicated Phuket Specialities section includes moo hong, pork belly stewed for four hours with garlic, peppercorns and coriander root, and Phuket phad mee Hokkien, a wok-fried yellow noodle dish with dark soy that traces its lineage to the Hokkien Chinese settlers who shaped the island’s food culture. These are dishes rooted in Phuket’s Baba Yaya Peranakan heritage, and are somewhat rarer in hotel dining rooms. The menu even comes with a page explaining the history, which reads like a kitchen that cares about where its recipes come from. It’s a nice touch.
Upstairs, the Dim Sun rooftop bar has stunning sunset views over the Andaman and a more contemporary small plates menu: crispy shrimp bao, crab and leek arancini with togarashi, Rajasthani tawa lamb chops. There is no dim sum on the menu.
Address: 38 Luang Phor Chuan Rd, Karon, Mueang Phuket District, Chang Wat Phuket 83100, Thailand
Website: avistagrandephuketresort.com
Manow Bistro & Bar
Ideal for a reliable, easy-going dinner on Karon’s main drag…
Manow sits at the entrance to Diamond Cottage Resort on Karon Road, technically closer to Kata than Karon, though the distinction matters more on a map than it does on the ground.
Manow is a relatively new opening, and it feels like it. The place works in stages. The street-level bar is open to the street, lively without being loud and the kind of place that you’d happily spend hours people watching. Up a level, the main dining room is bright and well thought out, with a large illuminated tree as a centrepiece. It’s open and breezy, but elevated just enough from the road to give you a vantage point for watching the evening traffic of Karon drift past below. Higher still, an upper terrace does the quieter work, suiting a long dinner for two in a way the lower levels simply don’t.
The menu moves between Italian and Thai without fully committing to either, but that’s welcome when you’ve got a disparate crowd to satisfy, or a fussy squad around the dinner table. The bolognese here is textbook; rich and meaty. The burger is built well and stays structurally sound until the last bite. On a strip where decent food is rarer than it should be, both are worth remembering. There is live music most evenings, which is nicely pitched and not too intrusive.
Prices are mid-range, portions are large, and there’s cold beer, too. It is the kind of place you end up going back to because it does enough things well that you stop looking for alternatives. The recent renovation makes it the most pleasant perch on this drag by some distance.
Address: Karon, Mueang Phuket District, Phuket 83100, Thailand
Instagram: @manow.bistroandbar
+39 Italian Street Food
Ideal for Roman pizza by the slice & aperitivo hour on the terrace…
Sure, it might technically be Kata, but who’s counting?
Named after Italy’s international dialling code, +39 has been serving Roman pizza alla pala from a small spot on Kata Road for a decade now, which makes it something of an institution by island standards. The Italian expat crowd that packs the place most evenings tells you everything you need to know about whether it is any good. They’re all perched on the handful of terrace seats out front, drinking Aperol spritz and telling you it’s good.
Alla pala is one of Rome’s native pizza styles: an oblong base baked directly on the oven floor, slid in on a long wooden paddle, with a high-hydration dough that produces a crust that is crisp on the outside and surprisingly airy within. The format here is closer to street food than sit-down restaurant. You choose your slices from a rotating selection behind the counter, from 130 baht, wait for them to be warmed through, and eat them at a table or take them to the beach. A three-slice mix at 400 baht is the smartest way to graze, and an aperitivo deal of one cocktail and two slices for 400 baht runs from 5pm to 8pm.
The selection changes as trays come in and out of the oven, but the speck e zucca is the one to time your visit around if you can: pumpkin, gorgonzola and scamorza on a crisp Roman base, smoky and sweet. The gricia carbonara with pancetta and pecorino is rich and salty and very much a glass-of-wine slice. Or, indeed, a cold Singha from the 7/11 across the way.
The majority of ingredients are imported from Italy, and the owner Virginia runs the place with the kind of pride in provenance that you feel the moment you walk in. This is the best pizza in Karon, no doubt, and one of our favourites on Phuket as a whole, in fact.
Address: 48, 26 Kata Rd, Karon, Mueang Phuket District, Phuket 83100, Thailand
Instagram: @plus39italianstreetfood
A Blanket & A Pillow
Ideal for sunset, clifftop drinks with your feet up…
A Blanket & A Pillow is not really a restaurant. It is a hillside cafe-bar built into the rocks between Karon and Kata, with bamboo terraces, bean bags, hammocks and swings cascading down a steep cliff to the sea. The name comes from a Thai-Chinese idiom about immigrants arriving with nothing but a blanket and a pillow. The Bunyawong family who run it started the place during Covid, building most of it themselves.
The food is secondary to the setting: Thai lunch boxes from 80 baht, spaghetti, cakes, smoothies. You order at the counter, get a buzzer, and find somewhere to sit. The point is the view. At sunset, looking out over the Andaman from one of the lower platforms with a cold drink in your hand, it is one of the best spots on this side of the island.
A few things to know: it is closed on Mondays, the kitchen shuts at 6pm, and it gets rammed with people taking photos from about 5pm onwards. Go earlier if you want (relatively speaking, of course) uninterrupted views.
Address: 10/1 Laemsai Road Tumbon, Karon, Muang, Phuket 83100, Thailand
Instagram: @ablanketandapillow
