Sometimes food bloggers get good perks such as free samples of goodies to test. Usually I have to turn these down because of my nomadic lifestyle. However, some you win and some you lose, and I just won big! Dr Paul Johnson of A Luxury Travel Blog (named the world’s best blog for luxury travel by the Daily Telegraph) asked me to go and review the Sea Sand Sun luxury resort and spa for him since I was in the area. Now there’s an offer you can’t refuse! So, without hesitation, Mr ND and I packed our bags and headed south to the resort. It was a truly superb place and you can read my review of it on ALTB.
After having such an enjoyable experience, I wanted to share it with you, the Not Delia readers. Above, you can see a photo of their spicy seafood salad which we had for lunch on one of the days. The Thai food is excellent at this restaurant and you simply could not find anywhere to beat the ambience of dining in a lovely restaurant beside a gorgeous private beach. I’ll be writing a bit more about the resort itself on our sister site British Expat – meanwhile, I’ll tell you about this particular dish.
Spicy seafood salad is a classic Thai dish, which you can find in most Thai restaurants. I made one myself not so long ago although I only used squid rather than mixed seafood. The one at the Horizon restaurant was exceptionally good, and a little different too. It included Chinese snow fungus, also known as silver fungus or white fungus, which adds a lovely crunchy texture to a dish. We use it at home sometimes. It comes dried and you rehydrate it; it doesn’t really taste of much but it does have a really good texture and soaks up the flavour of the other ingredients. I thought it was an innovative addition to the spicy Thai salad which, by the way, was served on a banana leaf in a beautifully made wooden platter.
Of course, Thailand is the land of smiles. And how’s this for service with a smile? Brilliant!
We ate there on both evenings of our stay, too. Our first evening’s meal was a showcase of the Horizon’s Thai repertoire – so the choice of dishes was theirs, not ours. It was a wonderful chance to try their signature dishes. The tom yam goong (hot and sour prawn soup – one of my favourites!) was fragrant and had just the amount of spiciness we like, neither blanded down for Westerners nor overly hot to satisfy macho “hottest thing on the menu” types. We were also served a delicious Thai pork curry and a very nice chicken dish. I’m not that much into chicken, but Mr ND got well stuck into it and pronounced it excellent.
So it was an easy decision to return for dinner the following evening. We ordered a few of our favourites, including tom kha talay – seafood soup with coconut milk – and a beautifully prepared red snapper.
Our third dish, a Thai prawn salad, was gorgeous too, with juicy fat prawns all properly cleaned. (I hate it when restaurants serve me prawns they haven’t bothered to clean properly first. The whole point of eating out is that you’re paying someone else to do the rudimentary kitchen tasks – all you should have to do is eat what you’re served.) Mr ND discovered some kind of weird vegetable in the dish which had the strange effect of drying out his mouth – it struck us afterwards that it was almost certainly banana flower.
Despite spending most of my time on the resort with notebook in hand, and carting around the Full Monty of camera equipment, I’m afraid that we had such a lovely time at the Horizon restaurant that somehow I went off-duty for a few hours and just enjoyed being there. So if we don’t seem to have any more notes, pictures or audio files to add to this it’s their fault, not mine, because it was such a terrific place. I did my best. 🙂
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