Yok Kheng
Bib Gourmand 2026

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

Ask anyone from Surat Thani which noodle shop is the face of the city, and the name "Yok Kheng" comes up almost every time. This old shophouse restaurant in the old market area right in the middle of town has stood long enough to become a local legend. It sits on Ton Pho Road near Coliseum Surat Thani, in what's traditionally been the trading heart of the city. MICHELIN itself places this restaurant squarely in the "Eat like a local" category — if you want to know what people in Surat Thani actually eat, sit down here. It's held a Bib Gourmand since the 2025 guide and kept that status straight through into the 2026 guide, which for a noodle shop charging under a hundred baht a bowl is proof that cheap and good can share the same bowl.

The dish that made Yok Kheng famous is "long tong," a clear-broth noodle soup in the Surat Thani local style that's getting harder to find every year. The name might sound unfamiliar if you're not from here, but the moment the bowl lands in front of you, you understand exactly why locals are attached to it. The broth is clear but so loaded with toppings you can barely see the noodles — pork ribs, fish balls, and red pork all packed into a single bowl. Eating it, you taste the flavour of a southern port town where Chinese immigrants settled and adapted their cooking to the local palate. Beyond long tong there's also kuay jub on the menu, morning glory stir-fry ("pak boong tai raw") is another dish people talk about a lot, and if there's still room, the shop's sticky rice with mango is the finishing dish many people make sure to save space for.

Yok Kheng's charm is that it never tries to be more than the city's everyday noodle shop. Old shophouse atmosphere, plain tables, bowls at 50-80 baht, but the customers range from Surat Thani locals who've been eating here since childhood to travellers passing through on their way to Koh Samui or Khao Sok. A lot of people see Surat Thani as just a transit town for connecting to a boat or a bus, but the old market neighbourhood where Yok Kheng sits is a good reason to stay a night — wander the old shophouses, find street food, and close out the day with a hot bowl of long tong. The city of a hundred islands isn't only about the sea, and Yok Kheng's bowl of long tong is the first piece of edible proof of that.