Pattaya for first-time visitors

Best restaurants

Pattaya's restaurant scene is not the one the beach-road billboards advertise. Away from the neon strip, the city cooks for the people who really live here: Thai families driving in from Naklua and Nongprue, Chinese and Russian long-stayers who have colonised whole sois, and Indian residents who quietly run some of the country's better vegetarian kitchens outside Bangkok. The twelve rooms below are chosen for that working-city Pattaya, not for the tourist promenade. You will find a Thai kitchen open until midnight on Pattaya Soi 7, a som tam house on Sukhumvit that runs until the last order is in, a Belarusian-and-Russian grill room that stays lit to 03:00, a beef-noodle counter that shuts at 16:00 sharp, and two Indian dining rooms built for South Asian residents who know their thali. Bring a taxi driver the Thai-script name and the address; the postal code 20150 will get you inside the city, and the street number does the rest.