A food court in PNG!

I love the concept of a food court. I love being able to buy the best food from each stall and bringing it to a table. It's almost like buying take away food from different places and bringing it back to your house except in this case, the food is still hot and the drinks are cold! Usually, food courts try to have multiple cuisines available at economical prices. The first successful food courts first came to be in the early 70's in the US and the concept soon spread to every corner of the world with a mall.

Thr first food court in Papua New Guinea is in the steamships plaza in Town. This strip mall initially had some success but due to the high costs of rental, the tenants soon vacated and the mall's shopping area was soon taken over by Asian businessmen who are mostly from Mainland China. The food court was also taken over by these businessmen and the standard soon dropped. I have only ventured into the small food court here twice and I daresay I have no intention of returning ever!

Vision City, the country's newest and largest shopping mall opened last year. In its plan, it had a sizeable food court which wasn't operational until recently. The latest stall to open in the food court is the roast stall which is operated by Dynasty restaurant just upstairs.



food court entrance





food court interior



In the display window of the stall hung a couple of roast ducks and several varities of cooked pork. I was hungry as it was already dinner time so I decided I'd give the place a try. For K24 which is roughly the equivalent of $8, I got a healthy serving of roast duck, barbecued pork, chicken rice, some soup with veggies in it and the ginger chilli sauce that I love that usually goes with chicken. It is good value in my opinion as far as PNG standards go.



roast food stall





roast duck, barbecue pork chicken rice with some soup



How was the food? It was alright. Nothing fantastic but not bad either. I just disliked the plastic cutlery that they gave me. It is a pain to have to eat duck with all of its bones with plastic cutlery. I ended up using my hands and I hate using hands to eat with. What makes it worse is that the toilet is on the other side of the mall so if you have to wash your hands, well you'd have to walk all the way across. I did walk away with a full stomach and I was glad that a proper food court has arrived to PNG shores!