All these photographs were taken by The Farangbowl at the Avista Grande Hotel August, 2021.
I’ve stayed and dined in quite a few quality and low budget hotels in my time (and please, I’m not bragging here), from the Hyatt Carlton Tower (now the Jumeirah) in Knightsbridge London to the Penninsula in Hong Kong, to a couple of hundred baht hotels/hostels on Kao San road, Bangkok. Given previous experiences, I must say that my stay at the Avista Grande Hotel on Karon Beach, Phuket was a pleasurable one.
The room I was put in (which was not their premier room) was superb and in my opinion, was one of the best I’d stayed in.
The hotel comes in two buildings separated by a first-class swimming pool and pool bar. One containing the rooms (on five storeys) and the second, reception, gym, restaurant and car park. The whole development is surprisingly well tucked away from Karon Beach with its entrance road passing that of the Andaman Seaview Hotel just before it. I lost count of the amount of times our taxi diver passed the entrance from Karon Beach road.
This buffet catered for all!
The Bowl
The staff were (no word of a lie), the most helpful and polite I’ve experienced in a long time and they made the stay a pleasurable one. Without a doubt, however, the star of the hotel’s show was the incredible breakfast buffet shown in the gallery photos. Every morning we were presented with a healthy blend of Eastern and Western cuisine with food ranging from a cooked breakfast of bacon, eggs, beans and sausages to waffles, pancakes and croissants to Thai noodles, Khao Tom or rice congee and Fried rice and Thai Red Curry (more on the Chief and F&B Manager in a later post). It was just such a shame that they didn’t run the buffet for lunch and dinner.
In all fairness given this was during the pandemic and there were around 20 people dining at each breakfast sitting and hardly anyone eating at the hotel at lunchtime and dinner, it didn’t make financial sense to do so.
Thai Green Curry. 
Egg and vegetable fried rice. 
The Cooked Breakfast booth.
The poor numbers eating during lunchtime and dinner also meant that some dishes were cancelled from the ‘a la carte’ menu each evening which was a bit frustrating. The food that was available was superb, especially the Thai cuisine. This is certainly a hotel that I will be returning to and will be running a feature on in the future when the farangbowl youtube channel launches later this year.
The Bowl
