UGO Restaurant, Italian Gelato and Craft Beer Bar — Restaurant in Chiang Mai Province

Traveling through thailand and and miss your local craft beer? Want to try the best of local Thai Cambodian beer? Look no further.

I got to meet the owner Ben today while trying to choose between the various local beers his place serves from the fridge in the restaurant. (Local means Cambodian and Australian beers because only Chang and Singha are allowed to be brewed in Thailand. This forces local passionate Thai brewers to work out of boardering countries.) Ben is really passionate about beer and you can tell when you chat with him. His restaurant has a great feel and the recommendations he gave and conversation I had with him made my experience that much more enjoyable (at least for this beer snob).

For now, he only has Tiger on draught but his restaurant currently has nearly 100 craft beers from around the world available in bottles. And this next week he is opening a taproom right behind this restaurant that will have 18 of these craft beers on draught (he literally walked me out of the restaurant to show me the new taproom in progress 90% complete with pool tables.) From Stone, to Deshutes, to Ballast Point to Anderson Valley and Evil Twin the man has some of the best in addition to a flurry of other beers for europe and as I mentioned, the best craft beers of Southeast Asia.

If you fancy yourself a beerfreak, you'd be a fool not to stop by his place, say hi, and enjoy a cold one with the man himself.

Cheers to you Ben! You made my day and I will be back everyday while...

Updated review to 4 stars because the owner reached out. Doing good for the young community providing work and working hard to make a great restaurant. Original statement below:

I was excited for a craft beer place (from ATL in the US). While they do have a great beer list with lots of local craft options, the prices seem too high for this area even being craft (150-300 thb per beer). Service was not great. Multiple servers and one that didn’t know the beer menu and had to slowly write letter by letter each beer that each of us at the table ordered.

Food was not good. We got Khao Soi and the Ravioli wontons. Khao Soi lacked flavor and chicken was gross. Wontons were soggy and seemed old.

I wanted to stay for more, but was unfortunately a let down. This place has...

Good spot! The owner himself is the one to greet customers and to seat them. When we arrived, the dining room had just filled up with people coming in from the terrace due to the rain. We were really interested in the craft beers so decided to take a chance on the terrace. Hugo has his employee escort us up to the terrace and told us that we could come back down to the dining room as soon as a table becomes available. A table freed up very quickly and we got to enjoy our drinks and meal inside the air conditioned dining room. There was a small mixup with our food order, but Hugo himself came to apologize and corrected the error right away. He even gave us complimentary samples of beer. We would...