Restaurant with a view… of Underwood Art Factory
The open-air restaurant is full of John Underwood's art.
There are plenty of restaurants in Phuket with views. But a restaurant with a view of a factory? Would we recommend this? Actually, we would, because this is an unusual factory – it’s John Underwood’s Art Factory on the bypass road, where John recently opened a quirky eatery for all.
The menu is simple, and the food – produced in an open kitchen – is excellent. The small menu of 15 items is all Asian but with a good variety; items include Thai-style seafood salad, lemongrass salad, chicken in coconut milk with galangal, sukiyaki, various stir-fried dishes, fried rice with pork, chicken or seafood.
Prices are very reasonable, ranging from 45 to 150 baht. To wash it all down there’s a variety of hot or cold drinks, beer or wine.
Blue elephants and tin siding. Note the hand next to the elephant on the right. It was retrieved from a rubber glove factory.
Surrounding diners is an eclectic – eccentric, even – collection of Underwood artifacts. The chairs come in a variety of shapes and colours and there are “distressed”-looking tables. One has a top made from an old tin Coca-Cola sign. Another has a top made from strips of another Coke sign, woven together.
The centrepiece is a full-size pool table, rehabilitated with a top made from parquet flooring. Above it hangs an extraordinary chandelier – sort of Victorian, sort of art deco, entirely Underwood. Just outside the open-sided restaurant are bizarre and amusing statues made from junk metal and old bits of wood.
Just about everything you can see in and around the restaurant is made from bits of something else – John has a personal mission to re-use, rehabilitate and recycle whenever he can.
“The thing about recycling,” he explains, “is the perception of beauty; the best way to achieve luxury is to change the perception of beauty. For me a tent can be as beautiful as a marble villa. The beauty’s already there in the object.”
At the back of the restaurant is a glass wall, through which you look down on the factory floor below. Showers of sparks fly from grinders, flashes of blinding brilliance flare from welders. Everywhere someone is filing, cutting or assembling arcane kits of bits that will, when finished, adorn a five-star resort or a beautiful holiday home.
The factory floor.
To see other examples of John’s unique work, take a wander around the Indigo Pearl Resort at Nai Yang Beach, and especially have a drink in the Tongkah Tin Syndicate bar, or dine at Hung Fat restaurant in Kalim, designed and built by the man. Other places on Phuket that feature his work include the JW Marriott, Dewa Resort and the Mövenpick in Karon.
So why a restaurant? “We already have a showroom-cum-fine art gallery, and I want to make it a centre for fine arts [already, the Phuket Writers Bloc meets there] so it seemed a good idea to have a restaurant as well, where people could meet or could pick up a magazine and have a cup of coffee or something to eat.”
Underwood Art is on the east side of the Phuket Town bypass road, just over 2 kilometres from the Koh Kaew intersection. The website is here. Look for a building with walls decorated with hundreds of old bits of tin roofing.
Thank you for this great recommendation. My boyfriend and I went after reading this and we loved it. I also want to mention that the menu, although small, even had a few items I had never tried nor seen on a Thai menu.
I don’t eat meat and I ordered the lemon grass salad. It was a cooked dish with cashews that I have never seen elsewhere. It was great!
Glad you liked it. We at the Observer did, too!