Cha-Am and Hua Hin: beaches, restaurants and life on the Gulf coast, where I now spend part of the year.
Like many people, I first noticed Slurp Lab because of its unusually high Google Maps score. I should mention something about that score. Customers who leave a five-star review are offered free ice cream. This probably helps the rating, so I would not treat the number alone as proof that the restaurant is exceptional.
Hua Hin has hundreds of restaurants. Finding somewhere to eat is easy. Finding somewhere doing something original is more difficult. Matt’s Place opened in central Hua Hin around April 2026. Matt, the British owner, has created a restaurant for people who enjoy food as an experience, not simply as a way to fill a plate….
There is a particular animal you almost never meet in Thailand: the foreigner who genuinely loves durian. We are spoken of more than we are seen. After twenty-two years here I had made a quiet peace with not being one of them. I could eat durian to be polite. I could nod along while a…
Every so often a place opens that makes you rethink what a small town can offer. Zeke Asian-Latino Kitchen is exactly that. It is tucked out in the rice fields just outside Cha-Am, and from the first plate you understand that someone behind that kitchen knows precisely what they are doing. Verify but I think…
Let me start with the most useful thing I can tell you, because it saves a lot of disappointment and a lot of misplaced expectations. Cha-Am is not Hua Hin. People lump the two together because they sit on the same coast, only about 25 kilometres apart, but they are genuinely different animals. Hua Hin…
I finally went to see the Hua Hin Safari & Adventure Park, also known as the hua hin zoo. It turned into one of those small, unexpected mornings that you remember for a long time. Where it is and how to get there The park sits in the countryside south of Hua Hin, in the…
Fresh palm sap, fermented or sweet, sold for 50–60 baht a bottle in Phetchaburi at a roadside shop called Lung Tanom. The bottles are wrapped in Thai schoolchildren’s homework. A small post about a small drink almost no foreigner ever finds.