Today, official said, they will allow the owners to remove furniture and fittings before the excavators go to work. The wall built on the sand around the restaurant's perimeter has already been smashed.
The restaurant, sitting atop a wall built out onto the beach, was plainly illegal, and hotels in the area such as those in the Laguna complex and the neighbouring Movenpick, had long resented Lotus's ability to suck guests out of their restaurants to it at its tables.
The much newer Palm Beach Club, right alongside Lotus, will be "inspected" today, officials said, but it seems likely to suffer the same fate.
More demolitions took place yesterday along Bang Tao Bay to the south of Lotus, mostly of small wooden restaurants and bars, many of them already abandoned and half-destroyed by the low season weather.