Best Seafood in Southeast Asia for Your Summer Vacations

Are you a seafood lover? Are you looking for a list of the best seafood to savor in Indochina? Here is top list of the best seafood in Southeast Asia for you on your Indochina tour.

In Vietnam

Vietnam is no doubt an essential destination in Southeast Asia for all seafood lovers. With more than 3000 km of coastline, 12 lagoons and bays, 115 estuaries, thousands of islands and islets, our country offers its visitors an exceptional variety of seafood. From the majestic Halong Bay in northern Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin to the island paradise of Phu Quoc in the far south, you are free to enhance your gastronomic discoveries with marine flavors.

See more: Top 20 Delicious Vietnamese Seafood to Savor

A tasty and juicy seafood hotpot in Vietnam

In Thailand

Few people know, but Thailand remains the third-largest supplier of seafood in the world! Home to thousands of miles of coastline, Thailand is full of delicious seafood dishes. Here are the most delicious seafood dishes you should taste during your tour to Thailand:

1. Tom yum goong

Tom yum goong, a must-try dish when coming to Thailand

It is a spicy shrimp soup (if you do not want it to be spiced, please specify your request at the restaurant while placing the order). It is one of the most famous dishes in Thailand and among best seafood in Southeast Asia. Many of its neighboring countries even serve it. The soup has the shrimp as its main ingredient and is spicy because of the Thai peppers. Many herbs and lime juice add flavor to this typical Thai dish!

2. Fried shrimp patties – Thawt Man Goong

This dish is certainly one of the most delicious Thai dishes. It can be an aperitif or a main dish. The main ingredients needed to make these fried pancakes are shrimp, red curry paste, a type of vegetable and an assortment of herbs. Usually, a sweet and sour cucumber sauce accompanies the dish, with sweet chili sauce being another option.

3. Papaya salad – Som tum

Papaya salad with green pepper and dry shrimp

The papaya salad is native to the Isaan region, in the northeast of Thailand. It is a very spicy salad prepared with a green papaya strip crushed with fish sauce, lemon juice and lots of peppers. There are many different versions of this salad, although it is the most popular with dried shrimp.

4. Boo Paht Pong Karee

We recommend that you try Boo Paht Pong Karee (Thai crab curry). This unique dish consists of dry curry powder and sometimes fresh milk, instead of a curry paste. Combined with oyster sauce, nam prik pao, white pepper, eggs, fresh peppers and celery, this dish is sure to please any curry lover.

5. Hor Mok

This is a traditional fish curry cooking and serving in a banana leaf. It is full of rich flavors that represent everything we love about Thai cuisine and is a heavenly combination of fish, red curry paste, kaffir lime leaves, sugar and coconut cream.

In Myanmar

6. Burmese seafood curry

Cambodian spicy shrimp curry

A classic of Burmese cuisine that you should not miss on your Myanmar tour! Whether it’s meat, fish, vegetables or eggs, curries are made with garlic, ginger, onions, turmeric and lots of oil.

Burmese seafood curry is a very easy recipe to make using easy to find ingredients. So you can do it at home! Traditionally, it is a fish curry, composed entirely of fish as a garnish, full of tomatoes and flavored with turmeric.

7. Fish and seafood

River fish but especially the incredible diversity of fish and seafood that you will find on the coasts of the Bengal Sea and the Andaman Sea. We especially like the little straw huts by the sea where you can eat your feet in the water with Burmese families. To test despite its strong odor the famous, the essential Ngapi fish sauce, a sauce made from fermented fish paste (or shrimp).

In Cambodia

8. Amok fish

Cambodian traditional Amok fish

Amok fish is one of the most famous Cambodian dishes, but you will find similar dishes in neighboring countries. The addition of slok ngor, a local herb that gives a subtly bitter flavor, separates the Cambodian version from the others.

Amok fish is a fish mousse with fresh coconut milk and kroeung, a type of Khmer curry made from lemongrass, turmeric root, garlic, shallots, galangal and Chinese ginger.

In upscale restaurants, amok fish is steamed in a banana leaf, while more local places serve a boiled version that looks more like a fish curry than a mousse.

9. Kdam chaa – Fried crab

This is a specialty of the Cambodian seaside town of Kep. Its lively crab market is famous for fried crab with Kampot green pepper. Kampot aromatic pepper is famous among food lovers around the world. Although it is available in its dried form internationally, you can only taste the green peppercorns here on your tour to Cambodia.

It’s worth visiting Kep and Kampot for that alone, but restaurants in Phnom Penh bring live crabs from the coast to make their own version of this delicious dish, which includes both Kampot pepper and tasty chives with garlic.

10. Ang dtray-meuk – Grilled squid

Grilled squid at Crab Market, Cambodia

In Cambodian seaside towns like Sihanoukville and Kep, you will find seafood vendors carrying small charcoal ovens on their shoulders, cooking squid as they walk along the shore.

The squids are brushed with lime juice or fish sauce then cooked on wooden skewers and served with a Cambodian sauce, originating in Kampot, based on garlic, fresh peppers, fish sauce, juice, lemon and sugar.

The summer flavor of the coast may even be in Phnom Penh, where many restaurants bring seafood from the coast to make similar versions of this dish.

11. Fried fish on the lake of fire

Fresh coconut milk is not popular in daily Khmer cooking, only on special occasions. This is why this dish belongs to best seafood in Southeast Asia.

One of those dishes is fried fish on the lake of fire – it is traditionally made for the holidays or eaten in restaurants in a special fish-shaped dish. A whole fish is fried and then finished on a hot plate at the table in a coconut curry made of yellow kroeung and peppers.

Vegetables like cauliflower and cabbage are cooked in curry and served with rice or rice noodles. The literal translation of this dish is trei bung kanh chhet, fish from the lake of kanh chhet, a Cambodian green vegetable with water served with this dish.

In Laos

12. Ping Pa (Roasted river fish)

Laos’ unique and delicious Ping Pa dish

The name of the river fish stuck on bamboo skewers is Ping Pa, seasoned with chopped kaffir lime leaves, galangal, lemongrass, coriander and lime juice before being roasted. This is a kind of “fast food”. You can have this specialty with a portion of sticky rice on your Laos tour.

13. Koi

Koi is a raw meat dish that is common in Lao culture and the northeast region of Thailand, Isan. The most popular iterations of koi are prepared in a similar way to a salad. The basic recipe includes thinly sliced ​​fish (usually locally caught tilapia) with chopped greens (green beans, shallots and galangal). They are mixed and seasoned with grilled ground rice, chili flakes, fish sauce and lime juice.

14. Mok Pa

Mok Pa in banana leaf – Laos’ special cuisine gift for you!

The pounded white fish is seasoned with spices and wrapped in banana leaves. Many Laotian houses have bananas growing outside and the leaves are used for cooking as well as for offering magnificent folded temple offerings. The fish is pounded with a rub of spices, often kefir leaves, onions, peppers, basil, fish sauce and salt. The steamed fish is flaky and fluffy and served with sticky rice. You can enjoy this with your hands or folks.