China Inn Cafe – green haven in Phuket Town centre
Cool and shady - the entrance to the China Inn Café.
The China Inn Cafe is one of Phuket City’s hidden jewels; even some people who have lived in Phuket all their lives have yet to realise it is there. Yet it’s been featured in Thai and foreign magazines, has been visited by royalty and was featured in Condé Nast Traveller magazine’s worldwide Hot List in 2007.
The restaurant was born of a romantic notion and a more practical one. The romantic notion was desire the desire of Supat “Noi” Phromchan, since she was a child growing up nearby, to possess what she describes as “the most beautiful house on Thalang Road”.
The romantic notion fitted the practical one; six years ago she ran an antiques shop nearby, with valuable regular customers she needed to entertain from time to time. “It was hard,” she explains, “to find a restaurant they liked to go to again and again.” She decided to open her own.
After the China Inn Cafe opened in October 2004, she amalgamated the two businesses, so that now, in order to reach the restaurant, one walks through a couple of anterooms where antiques are displayed.
Tables are arranged in the shade alongside the courtyard wall, looking out into the delightful garden.
The front rooms are dark and cool, with light from the enclosed garden beyond beckoning one to eat just a few steps away from the kitchen at the far end. The restaurant is a cool green haven in the centre of the city, a place to linger after lunch with a good book or good conversation. No one ever hurries out of the China Inn Cafe.
But getting the building to its current charming state was no easy task. The beautiful house Khun Noi knew as a child was a crumbling wreck by the time she signed the lease.
“It was very expensive to do it up,” she recalls, “even though we tried to do as much as we could ourselves. It wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be.” Despite the fact that the building is a classic 100-year-old Chinese shop-house built according to feng shui principles, there was no help from the government to preserve it.
Nor is it easy top look after, she says. She taps paint flaking from one of the walls. “Maintenance is difficult,” she admits. “We repaint every year.”
Electricity, drains and water pipes have also been problems, mainly because modern living puts greater demands on infrastructure than the lifestyle of 100 years ago, when the servants used to bathe alfresco in the area that now contains the restaurant’s garden, and where one can still see the original well.
But has her childhood dream come true? She breaks into a big smile. “Ninety-nine percent,” she says.
Apart from making the dream come true, the restaurant allows her to indulge her two other passions – cooking and gardening. She can often be found in the kitchen, helping the two cooks, or unobtrusively tidying up a heliconia or an orchid. “Things seem to grow easily here,” she says.
The restaurant is small, capable of handling 25 people at a time, seated, or a maximum of 75 for a private buffet. But it has attracted considerable attention in all the right places.
One couple who popped in for a cup of tea (well, it took a bit more organizing than that) were the King and Queen of Sweden, who were in Thailand celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary.
Another visitor was a queen of a different kind: Natalie Glebova, Miss Universe 2005, who was on a walking tour of the old town after her win in the competition, held in Bangkok.
The menu concentrates on good, simple food, both Thai and Western-style, with delightful Thai desserts. “I like to cook,” Khun Noi says. “Home cooking – the menu is from the family kitchen and my husband’s favourites. And we know what our friends like.”
The China Inn Cafe is at 20, Thaland Rd, Phuket City, Tel: 076-356239. From May to October it is open 9 am to 6 pm, while from November to April it is open from 9am to 6pm from Monday to Wednesday, and from 11 am to 11 pm from Thursday to Saturday. It is closed on Sundays.
