Hok Kee Lao
Bib Gourmand 2026

🔄 Last checked 2 Jul 2026 · details and hours can change — check the venue before you go

Mention Takua Pa Old Town and most people picture the Sino-Portuguese shophouses and the quiet heritage street. But locals in Phang-Nga will give you another name right away: "Hok Kee Lao," an old Thai-Chinese restaurant that's been open for more than 40 years in a two-storey shophouse in the middle of Takua Pa. Step inside and you still get that old-school Chinese-restaurant feel that's getting harder to find — big round tables, dishes brought out one by one for the whole table to share, the same way Takua Pa's Chinese families have eaten for generations. Takua Pa was once a booming tin-mining town, and the Chinese migrants who came to work the mines brought Southern Chinese food culture with them, a tradition that's stayed rooted here ever since. Hok Kee Lao is one of the restaurants still carrying that flavor forward today.

MICHELIN has awarded this restaurant a Bib Gourmand for several years running, from around 2022 through the 2026 guide, for a reason that's refreshingly simple: it's a family-gathering restaurant with a consistent hand in the kitchen — no gambling on whether today's meal will be good. The dish MICHELIN singles out is the soy-braised free-range chicken served with water spinach — firm free-range chicken blanched just right, dressed in the restaurant's own soy sauce recipe, and eaten with blanched water spinach that needs nothing else added. The other standout is the loaded tofu — fried tofu with minced pork and shrimp, a dish the kids at the table tend to claim before anyone else gets a chance. And the crab noodle rolls, minced pork mixed with shrimp meat and deep-fried, make an easy, moreish snack while you wait for the mains.

Two more dishes worth trying are the crab tube noodles and the dry-fried fish maw — both Chinese-style dishes that take real skill and that most restaurants simply don't offer. Eating them in a restaurant this old feels different from eating them anywhere else. Anyone driving the Khao Lak-Takua Pa route, or wandering the old town for photos, will find this restaurant a worthwhile stop for lunch or dinner if you plan your timing right — per-person prices sit in the low hundreds, but you're eating Chinese cooking at a level MICHELIN has kept vouching for year after year, in a small Andaman-coast town that most people just drive through.