Thai Food in Rawai

Cooked by Lek, beside a Breton kitchen

Two kitchens working the same service

Lek and Bertrand ran their first restaurant together at Kata for eight years before moving south. A Breton on one side of the pass and a Thai cook on the other, both working the same service, is rarer than it sounds. It means the Tom Kha Gai is not a French approximation of a Thai soup, and the galette is not a Thai kitchen’s idea of Brittany.

It also means a table does not have to agree. One person orders a rib-eye with béarnaise while the person opposite has papaya salad, and both arrive at the right temperature at the same moment. For families and mixed groups — the standing problem of eating out in Phuket — that is the whole argument.

Soups and salads, where a Thai kitchen shows its hand

There is nowhere to hide in a soup. Tom Yam comes with fish or with prawns; Tom Kha Gai, the gentler coconut and galangal version with chicken, carries the chef’s mark on the menu. There is a clear minced-pork soup with glass noodles and a sour pork rib soup for anyone who wants the sharper end.

The salads are franker still. Green papaya som tam is pounded to order, and you can ask for it as mild or as brutal as you like. Larb — minced meat with toasted rice and herbs — comes with pork, chicken, duck or beef. There is a glass noodle salad with prawns, pork with lime and chilli, and raw prawns in fish sauce for the confident.

How to read the stir-fry page

The stir-fry section is laid out as a grid, and once you understand it the whole menu opens up. Down the left are the preparations — sweet pepper, spring onion and oyster sauce, mushroom, ginger, sweet and sour, garlic and pepper. Across the top are the proteins. You pick one of each.

Chicken and pork sit at one price, duck, beef, squid, prawns and seafood at the next. That is the entire pricing structure, and it means a stir-fried chicken with ginger — a dish most people never think to order and then think about for weeks — costs around 190 baht in a room with linen napkins and a French wine list.

Rice, noodles and the pineapple

The one to order is the prawn fried rice served inside a fresh pineapple. It could easily be a gimmick and is not, because the fruit steams the rice from the inside and the sweetness lands against the chilli instead of flattening it. Tom Yam fried rice and green curry fried rice with seafood sit alongside it.

On noodles, Pad Thai runs at one price with pork or chicken and a step up with prawns or seafood, and the same spread covers fried glass noodles, wide noodles with oyster sauce, and Raad Na — wide noodles under a gravy that is one of the most comforting things on the menu when it rains.

What dinner for two actually costs

Add it up. Two people can eat a soup, a salad, a stir-fry, rice and a fried noodle dish for well under a thousand baht between them. On a beachfront terrace in high season that buys a starter. Here it buys dinner, cooked by someone who has been doing it for a quarter of a century, in a room with proper glassware and a wine list if you want one.

That is the quiet achievement of Le Celtique, and it is worth saying plainly: the standard is high and the prices are not. Nothing on the Thai menu is priced as a courtesy to the French one.

Finding Le Celtique

Le Celtique is at 80/90 Soi Huay Nam Toe, Rawai, close to Nai Harn and away from the crowds. Seasonal evenings and the spit-roast nights are announced on their Facebook page.

Opening details, the gallery and a contact form are on the Le Celtique profile page, and more of the island’s kitchens are in our best restaurants in Phuket section.

Booking: 09 87 35 81 99 or 09 26 28 74 56 — 80/90 Soi Huay Nam Toe, Rawai, Phuket 83100.