Uncle Man's Pork Hotpot

Good BBQ & POT, Cheap Price and good view
Nice music, very chill dinner here

Excellent food, beautiful view, kind staff. This restaurant is off the beaten tourist trail, so it is very cool. The clientele is entirely Thai, mostly city Thais on day trips from nearby cities.

You get to cook your own food on a small flame-powered grill/hotpot (กระทะ “grá tá” in Thai). You can cook pork, pork belly (uncured bacon), vegetables (cabbage, morning glory, mushrooms), tofu, rice noodles, fish, and eggs.

The price is ฿139 per tray of food. You can also order a tray of any combination of the individual food items, and the pricing is ฿29–169 per tray (pork costs more than vegetables). When I was there, the owner helpfully wrote down the English names of the available items and their prices on a little piece of paper with the help of Google Translate. She actually did this on the spot just for my wife and me, just to be helpful. I can actually read Thai, but that was very kind of her to spend about 10 minutes of her time just to help us out!

Available drinks are beer (Cháng), Coke, and bottled water.

Here is how cooking works with the grá tá:

The nice owner will put a small butane-powered grill on your table, on top of which she will put the grá tá for cooking food. The grá tá will start heating up and will be ready for grilling in 1–2 minutes. Then she will bring out a round tray of uncooked pork and vegetables. (She will bring you additional trays of food on request, until you are full, ฿139 each time for the default-mix tray which contains a little bit of everything.) You can use tongs to place the pork on top of the central grill portion of the grá tá to cook. Around the outside of the grá tá is a circular channel filled with brine (slightly flavored, slightly salty water) in which you can cook the non-pork items (cabbage, mushrooms, rice noodles, fish, and so on). This broth will become a delicious soup as it cooks and boils down, and you can add more brine from the provided jug if the water level gets too low. You can spoon the soup into the provided soup bowls (just use your own soup spoon), and you can grab the cooked noodles with the tongs or with your chopsticks. You can crack the egg and poach it in the soup along one side of the grá tá. There are two spicy dipping sauces (one red, one green) for seasoning the pork, after cooking, in the shallower of the provided bowls.

I love this restaurant and hope you will too.