Victory Monument in Bangkok may be the best place to go for boat noodles as the Boat Noodles Alley is just a few minutes walk from the BTS station. However, there is also another gem in the neighbourhood – a popular mookata joint, Pla Thong Mookata, that is frequented & highly recommended by the locals.
Pla Thong Mookata
Phaya Thai Road
Bangkok 10400, Thailand
Tel: +66 84 354 8282
Opening hours: 4.00pm to 12.00am daily
Pla Thong Mookata is just a stone’s throw away from Victory Monument BTS Station. It is located next to Century Mall/Movie Plaza.
The buffet at Pla Thong Mookata is priced at 169 baht (< SGD7) per person. Beverages are not included. If you have too much leftover food on your table, you will be charged an additional 169 baht per person so just take what you can eat, don’t waste.
It might be an open-air dining space but because of the high ceiling and spaciousness, the area was actually quite well-ventilated. We didn’t feel warm or stuffy even though we came at about 4.30pm on a hot, sunny day.
The buffet area was concentrated on one corner. If you’re here early like us (between 4-5pm), taking food from the buffet will not be much of an issue. But once we hit peak dinner time and the restaurant gets filled up, people will just crowd around the buffet area and the whole restaurant is like a busy market.
My tip is to come early (about 4.30pm or so will be ideal) for an early dinner (if you’re still hungry later on, there are always late night street food available anyway) as that’s also when the cooked dishes are freshly served up before hungry hands take them all. Well, it can be ridiculous when the crowd comes in – you’ll know what I mean when you’re there, lol.
Let’s take a look at the buffet. Wide array of chicken and pork meats in plain and marinated forms. That whitish-looking thing in the foreground was pork lard by the way. You will need some of that to grease up the mookata pan before you start grilling anything – otherwise food will stick and char very quickly.
The seafood selection included 2 types of fish, squids and cured cuttlefish. No prawns though.
Vegetable options included water spinach (kang kong), cabbage, xiao bai cai and enoki mushrooms. There were also noodles and rice vermicelli.
This section was where you can make your own salad or dessert. There was also a mortar and pestle if you want to try your hands at making som tam (papaya salad).
The cooked dishes were mainly Thai local fare like stir fried clams, century egg with salted egg, stir fried pork and chicken feet salad. For carbs, there were fried rice and spaghetti. And later on, we also spotted grilled pork skewers being served up which I guessed would be the Special of the Day.
There were also fried finger-food like nuggets, fries and similar processed food.
This was all that we ate which we didn’t even manage to finish. Didn’t go for second round because we weren’t super famished (impossible right because we had been eating street food all day) and we came here just because we wanted to try the Bangkok mookata experience, lol.
As mentioned, drink charges are separate. The coke (bottle), iced water (bottle) and ice (in a bucket) were priced at 25 baht each.
The water in the kettle was meant for the mookata pan as it would dry up quite quickly so you would need to refill every now and then.
Really wondered why the grill pan had to be rounded, the meats kept slipping off the surface, lol.
The pork here had a really strong porky smell that might turn some people off so sample with a small portion first before grabbing a big plate of it. And you might want to skip the lard if so, otherwise it would melt into the water and make it less palatable.
The fried snacks were decent. Nothing to shout about but at least the frying oil tasted fresh.
I probably enjoyed the cooked dishes most especially the chicken feet salad, pork skewers and century egg/salted egg. All were flavoursome and tasty.
All in all, I must say I’m really not a big fan of mookata after this. It takes a really long time to cook the meats which don’t even brown up as much as I want them to be. Perhaps it’s because of that reason, that’s why we feel filled up very quickly as it’s more of waiting than eating.
Seriously, I’m up for Korean BBQ anytime but not so much for Thai mookata.
The meal wasn’t spectacular but if you love your meats and you particularly love a good deal like this, then it’s definitely worth dining at Pla Thong Mookata. Just come on an evening when you have nothing planned so you can spend a couple of hours eating to your heart’s and tummy’s content. ?