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| - I love southeast Asian food - Thai, Laotian, Hmong, and Vietnamese in particular. So I really, really wanted this place to be good, but many of its flavors fell flat and I found some non-food items in my food, a cardinal sin in my book.
I ordered three items for delivery at close to 2 p.m. a few days ago, since they were no longer accepting carry-out orders (though according to their hours they were open at that time). While this isn't exactly a rush time for lunch orders, it still took over an hour to get my food. The delivery fee for these three items was $4 plus 10% of the total (not including the driver's tip, yeesh), a bit steeper than I like to pay for delivery. I ordered medium-spicy chicken pad Thai, larb, and the Thai version of their green papaya salad. All parts of my order were delivered.
Each of the items was disappointing. The pad Thai arrived stone-cold. The noodles were gluey and stuck to each other in clumps. The sauce was bland, the chicken was desiccated. There were a few anemic bean sprouts sprinkled throughout, but they didn't have the pleasant crunch that I like most about bean sprouts. A lime wedge helped a little, but it wasn't enough. About halfway through my meal, I found a short black hair. As someone with shoulder-length blonde hair, this put me off the pad Thai completely. I was looking forward to the larb, since I had never tried tripe before. While the tripe was chewy and flavorful, the other ingredients combined to make it so salty that it was almost inedible. If you order this, make sure to cut it with a lot of rice to minimize the saltiness. At least this didn't have any non-food items in it, which is more than I could say for the thing I was craving the most, the green papaya salad. I had high hopes for it, given that it seemed to be the highest-recommended green papaya salad in Madison. Well, maybe I got a bum batch, but this was a disaster. I ordered the Thai version instead of the Lao version because it's supposed to have much less of a fishy taste, something other reviewers had noted was a bit of a problem with the green papaya salad. I shudder to think of what the Lao version must taste like, because the Thai version was completely overwhelmed with either fish sauce or shrimp paste. There was also so much dressing that the salad looked more like a soup. I could hardly smell it without gagging, but I wanted it so much that I tried a few bites. That was a mistake. I bit into a shrimp tail shell on my first bite. While I know it's common practice to crush shrimp tail shells in with the dressing, most of the time those shells are *removed* once the dressing has been prepared because they aren't pleasant to chew. A few bites later, I nearly cracked my tooth on a small rock that had made its way into my salad. It was at this point that I gave up. God only knows what else might have been in there.
The thing I love so much about southeast Asian food is its flavor complexity - on average, a dish will combine all five tastes (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami), and that difficult balancing act is something I can't seem to accomplish myself, which is why I tend to order this type of cuisine instead of inevitably messing up that precarious balance while trying to cook it myself. Suwanasak's flavor profiles were so wildly unbalanced that the food was nearly inedible, and the added non-food items, including one that could lead to costly dental work, were the final nail in the coffin. I will be avoiding this place like the plague in the future.
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