The Seafood Cafe & Restaurant is the air-conditioned indoor option on Soi Texas, the Chinatown corner where T&K Seafood and Lek & Rut run their famous street-side operations every night. It opens at 11:00 and keeps the kitchen going until 23:00, which is unusual for a stretch of Phadung Dao Road that mostly comes alive after dark. The menu runs past one hundred items and leans on live tanks stocked with lobster, river prawns, oysters, crab, salmon and whole seabass.
The format is flexible. You can order a la carte, pick one of the tiered set menus built for two, three, five, six or ten dishes, or commit to the unlimited seafood buffet. That structure, plus listings on Klook, KKday, Waug and Pelago, explains the steady tourist traffic, but the cooking stays rooted in Chinese-Thai seafood technique: salt-baked prawns, steamed fish with soy and ginger, chili-garlic crab. With 1,304 Google reviews averaging 4.7 stars, The Seafood Cafe has built a reputation as the reliable indoor alternative when the sidewalk tables next door are full or the rain rolls in.
You enter off Phadung Dao into a bright, tiled dining room rather than the plastic stools and charcoal smoke of the street operators outside. Staff seat you quickly, walk you through the set menu tiers, and point out what's fresh in the live tanks near the door. Service is brisk and bilingual, geared to both Thai regulars and the constant rotation of visitors walking the Chinatown food trail.
The crowd is mixed: families working through a ten-dish set, couples splitting a lobster and a whole fish, solo diners grabbing a plate of grilled river prawns at lunch. Dishes come out as they finish rather than coursed, and the kitchen is happy to fire a second round of oysters or prawns if you tag the buffet option. Expect to be in and out in about an hour for a set menu, longer if you're pacing a buffet.
Grilled river prawns are the Soi Texas signature and The Seafood Cafe runs them the classic way: split, grilled over heat until the head fat turns orange, served with a bright seafood nam jim on the side. Fresh oysters come raw on crushed ice from the small raw bar up front, shucked to order. The fried seabass is a house specialty, a whole fish cooked until the skin shatters and the flesh stays moist, finished with either three-flavor sauce or garlic and pepper. Lobster anchors the top-tier set menus alongside crab and salmon, usually split between a grilled half and a stir-fried half with butter or glass noodles. Add chili-garlic crab or steamed river prawns with glass noodles if you're building a larger table.
The Seafood Cafe sits at 51/1 Phadung Dao Road in the heart of Yaowarat, on the short stretch locals and guidebooks call Soi Texas. It's a Chinese seafood restaurant in Yaowarat, Bangkok, a five-minute walk from MRT Wat Mangkon exit 1, with the Chinatown gate and the T&K Seafood corner as obvious landmarks.
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