Telephone: 076 257054/081 7876600

Open: noon-10pm

Address: 14 Bangkok Road, Phuket City, 83000

Style: Chinese, with fresh Thai ingredients

Price range: Moderately expensive. Fried mantis shrimp (160 baht for 100 gm) shark fin soup with crab meat (1500 baht). Abalone and whelks no longer available.

Specialty: Seafood

It's almost China National Day, a 60th birthday of great importance, so we venture to the restaurant that we are told is possibly the best Chinese restaurant on the island. Appetites work in strange ways. On Hong Kong island, surrounded by Chinese food, we'd find ourselves desperate for Thai. On Phuket island, with Thai food on every corner, tasty Chinese makes a pleasant change. Only when we are seated at a familiar white linen-covered table, with red napkins and chopsticks, do we notice the front window. Two huge sharks' fins float there, each decorated with a bright red ribbon rosette. Sharks' Fin Soup is apparently a specialty, one we are not going to try today or probably any other day. But birthdays are about celebrating, not preaching righteous indignation, so we work our way around the tricky bits in the menu. There are quite a few tricky bits. We look at the rows of shellfish in the aquarium tanks, all about to undergo the culinary equivalent of walking under a bus. Soon we are using toothpicks to winkle tasty critters from their tiny shells. They have been cooked with rum. The mantis shrimp is great, too, covered in garlic. We peel back the shell and plunge into luscious purple flesh. Somehow, eating Chinese is always going to be about texture, seldom about sauce. The sea bass is superbly soft, and not the slightest bit spicy. The same cannot be said of the Thai-style seafood salad, although it has a subtle flavor compared to conventional somtam. The golden iced tea keeps coming. We've made a mess of the tablecloth, and of the meal. Yes, Hong Kong probably is Phuket's best Chinese.

How to find it: Look for a shopfront on the left in Bangkok Road as you head down the one-way, close to the fresh market roundabout, with Salvatore's on the opposite side of the road.

Parking: Not always easy to find a spot, but Hong Kong is definitely worth a short walk.

Phuketwan restaurant reviewers pay for their meals. If someone else does, we tell you so