Pickles Pub & Bistro, Koh Samui

This place in Chaweng South (Chaweng Beach Road, 38/73, Moo 3, Tambon Bo Phut, 0-7742-2079) is typical of the sorts of places I would normally shun on the basis that it is clearly a tourist trap serving "safe" non-local food, as well as the fact that this place was seemingly suffering from a huge identity crisis. It was billed as "South African Full BBQ," but the menu featured everything from Greek food to Italian (apparently its sister Italian restaurant upstairs has been around for a while). Unfortunately, I didn't have much choice in the matter tonight, so I figured that I would simply endure it and hope for the best. The only consolation was the beautiful looking pig roasting on a spit outside, which I hoped would taste as good as it looked.

Fortunately, it did, and I was decently impressed with the smoky taste and tender texture (the BBQ sauce was unnecessary). They also brought us some barbequed seafood, which, interestingly enough, included crab. I'd never seen crab singed directly on an open flame before, but this turned out to have a decently grilled taste without making the meat excessively dry.

The real clincher for me though was the pig skin that they brought out later (for some reason, they didn't include any skin in the pig-on-a-spit "Medievil [sic] BBQ" platter, so we made the effort to explicitly ask for some later). What a good move. These thin slices were crispy and tasty, making the place worth the while, in spite of my biases. I guess I'm just a sucker for meat on a fire.