The Food

The food here is super great. We get a free breakfast every morning with our vacation package. No room service breakfast, but if we go down to the restaurant, they seat us and ask whether we want coffee or tea. Their earl grey is super good.

There is a huge variety of food. There's some weird stuff like salami-looking sliced meat and little gerkin pickles, sliced smoked fish, and a variety of cheeses, including blue and brie. Then there's a yogurt and cereal area with lots to choose from. There is a ton of fresh fruit, so I gorge on that every morning. There's fresh pineapple, mango slices, papaya, grapefruit sections, bananas, lychee, and some fruits I don't recognize. There's an area with lots different kinds of bread (and rolls and pastries and muffins) and a toaster and really good butter and several different kinds of jam, including a bitter marmalade, which is my favorite. There are warming containers with hot food like bacon, broiled tomato halves (I eat a ton of these...yum), sauteed mushrooms, and herbed roasted potatoes. There's also an egg area with a nice man who will cook you an omlet or fried or scrambled eggs to order. You tell him what you want, and he'll cook it and have it brought over to your table. Last, there is a juice area with fresh-squeezed orange, carrot, and pinapple juices. The juicer and fruits and carrots are right there, and when the containers get low, they juice more right there. The juicer is super quiet, so it's cool instead of startling or annoying.

The first couple of days, we ate like pigs at breakfast and then had an early dinner. Yesterday we had all three meals. The Kata Barbeque restaurant is a much cheaper lunch option than the fancy hotel restaurant, and the variety is good. You will not believe this, but Tony has ordered a cheeseburger there and a chicken sandwich! Crazy man... He said they were good, and I'm glad he can get Western food when he craves it. I've gotten prawns in red curry sauce and a spicy salad with tomatoes, cilantro, prawns, glass noodles, and extremely hot peppers, which I mistook only once for little green beans. Whew, it is not a mistake you'd make twice.

We've eaten in the fancy hotel restaurant twice, and I think we're starting to get the hang of it. Our "free dinner" coupons are worth 1,000 Baht off dinner or a free dinner if you order a set meal. The first night, we ordered an expensive set meal, not the free one, and the food was delicious but tiny portions, and it all ended up being a lot more expensive than we bargained for. Last night we ordered a la carte, which turned out to be a smart option, since we like relatively cheap dishes like pasta (Tony) and vegetable curry (me). In fact, we used only one coupon, which I didn't realize we could do, and paid the 200 Baht over instead of losing 800 Baht by using two coupons. Anyway, the whole dinner experience is lovely there, so it's great to have figured out how to better afford eating at the hotel restaurant.

The hotel restaurant has a lovely deck right off the ocean, and on clear nights like last night you can sit out there and watch the sun set behind Crab Island. It was beautiful. They have two layers of white linen tablecloths and white linen napkins. The waiters pull out my chair and put the napkin in my lap. There are candles on the tables in hurricane glass so they don't blow out. And at the end of the meal, they bring little wooden boats with an orchid for decoration and rolled up cool, eucalyptus-scented washcloths to wipe our hands. (Tony's chest is sunburned, and we joked about his unbuttoning his shirt and laying the cool washcloth on his chest and hearing the sizzle as the water and eucalyptus oil hit his skin.) When they bring the check, they also bring a red rose for the lady. It's really fancy and nice. We have such a good time.