Considering the fact I’m traveling with a chef, this blog has been shamefully short on the culinary adventures we’ve enjoyed during our trip. I hope to rectify that moving forward, and there’s no better place to start than the Saichon Seafood Buffet, where we dined on our last night in Chiang Mai.

We ended up here on a recommendation from Ice, our tour guide at Elephant Nature Park. Ice is a chef in Copenhagen when he’s not at ENP (nice life, right?) so we were really excited to try his description of a local gem. He promised that it would be cheap, delicious, and plentiful. Can’t go wrong with that combo, right?

Well, plentiful it was. I was so overwhelmed I had to take a video.

We walked into this large open-air pavilion and sat down at a wooden booth -for sure the only tourists there. The first thing I noticed was our fellow diners’ tables covered in small and medium-sized plates and bowls of marinated raw meats, sauces, seafoods, veggies, condiments, and in the center a tabletop BBQ. The BBQ burned charcoal and had a moat of broth around it. Diners would grill their selected proteins on the tabletop BBQ and add vegetables, noodles and sometimes seafoods into the broth.  When the meat was finished they’d transfer it into a medium personal bowl, add as much broth as they liked, whatever garnishes and condiments they wanted, and chow down.

 

We kinda stared at everybody else for awhile before a server (more of a BBQ facilitator than a server)  came over and pointed out  that we could just go to the buffet at the back of the restaurant and start selecting our dishes – everything here is one price, all you can eat, just go for it.

Aside from the salad bar, there were no less than 10 stations of different types of food, and a WHOLE TABLE devoted to condiments. I think we both appeared hesitant, so one of the facilitators kindly walked us thru the stations, although I didn’t understand 1/3 of what she said. None of the offerings were labeled (and remember, I’m allergic to sesame), so I was really lucky to be with Aleksiy who either recognized what things were, volunteered to try stuff, or unabashedly asked someone standing nearby. We filled up a tray each, and headed back to our table where the BBQ facilitator had the charcoal rolling.

 

 

 

Our facilitator took a cube of something greasy (lard?) and rubbed it all over the surface of our BBQ, leaving the melty remnants at the very top/center. She then took a  pitcher of broth (veggie stock?) and poured it into the moat. She grabbed some of our meats and arranged them on top of the grill, then a chopstick full of veggies and noodles for the broth. A couple of broad smiles and deep nods from us convinced her that we weren’t going to burn the place down and she left us to our devices. Aleksiy was in heaven.

We went back to the buffet a couple (OK 3) more times, once we figured out what we really liked. Our BBQ facilitator would come back over and make sure our charcoal was hot enough, that we had enough broth, and occasionally clear away the embarrassing collection of plates that were piling up. It ended up being SUPER CHEAP – if I remember correctly it was only $5/person. Ice FTW.