Banzaan Market in Patong, Phuket – awesome for fresh seafood!

My memories of the two days I recently spent in Phuket are a bit of a blur, but if I had to recommend anywhere to go eat in Patong, I would recommend the Banzaan Market.

Banzaan is a fresh market not too far away from Bangla Road, the tourist strip with the nightclubs and bars and just behind the Jungceylon, the shopping centre (by the way, if you’d like to get a cheap Thai massage in a clean environment, the basement level there has good choices at the same rates as massage parlours on the street). The bottom level of Banzaan opens quite early with an array of fresh fruit and vegies, meats, and glorious seafood. There is also a little drinks / dessert stall in the middle with some Thai snacks and fresh coconuts! My big struggle in Phuket was that there were ample coconuts being sold on the street by roaming fruit vendors, but nowhere nice to sit to drink them. This place solved that problem.

At night time, a mini night food market sets up in the carpark out front of Banzaan. Tonnes of grilled seafood options, fried foods, noodles, rice dishes, so on…  But if you want the real deal, head on past the street food to inside where the seafood vendors continue to sell their fresh seafood until night time. After you choose your fresh live seafood from the tanks, you take it upstairs to the second level where there are about 10 restaurant stalls waiting to cook your seafood for you.

My partner and I ummed and ahhed for ages because we just couldn’t decide what seafood to choose when faced with so many tantalising options at ridiculously cheap prices! Should we get the king prawns? or the lobsters? or the scallops? or the crabs? or the cockles? To be honest, we were having a first world meltdown as the seafood vendors shouted prices and thrusted live lobsters at us, clearly feeding on our hesitation and confused glances at each other. In the end, we opted for two lobsters and one king prawn. Upstairs, we chose to have one of the lobsters stirfried with fried garlic and the other with a ginger sauce.

 

The fried garlic is an absolute must. If you like garlic, you will love it as it is so crispy and every mouthful is a delight! The lobsters were juicy and sweet and definitely tasted fresh.

For the prawn, we decided to go with just BBQ / grilled. This simplicity maintained the sweetness of the prawn which was perfect with the dipping sauce and I could have eaten 5 of those prawns. And 5 of those lobsters…

On our way home (crawling from the legendary meal we just had!) we also managed to squeeze in some steamed pandan coconut desserts from the night market outside Banzaan – they don’t look super appealing but they were super yum and not too sweet!