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| - There is a note on this page "from the owners" that states that new owners "recently" took over this location. It is unfortunate that this site doesn't delete all reviews written when the old owners ran it because any restaurant is 100% about where the owners buy their food, how they cook it, how they treat their customers and how much they charge, NOT the name on the building. I can only assume most of the "positive " reviews were written about the "old" owners' place and not what the "new" owners did after they took over.
Whatever the culture I believe there is no such thing as "the best" of any food. Whether burgers or pizza, Mexican or Asian the joy of eating is to experience subtle regional differences and the unique style of the chef. That said, Thai food does have certain characteristics that define it like a blend (always a blend) of the five flavors of sour, sweet, salty, bitter, and spicy. Unfortunately Tom Yum's interpretation of blend ended up being more like bland and that is the one word I would use to describe their style of food preparation.
We shared two dishes. First the soup, a hot and sour broth with pieces of chicken. Overall it wasn't bad. The reddish broth had a nice kick to it and the fact that they used white meat chicken was a plus. However the chicken pieces tasted like they were from a can ... devoid of all flavor. The biggest negative about the soup however was that it was $10 for a very small container, a fraction of the size our favorite local Chinese restaurant serves for half the price. Tom Yum's soup just isn't worth ten bucks.
Our other dish was Ginger Fantasy which is described as "Mixed chicken, pork, beef and shrimp sauteed with ginger, onion, carrot, mushrooms, and bell peppers in a garlic ginger sauce". Being brutally honest it was as bland as something from a steamer tray at Panda Express. The "fantasy" must be that you are supposed to imagine the non-existent flavors. It comes with adequate amounts of rice and a "brick" of noodles but the serving size of the menu item itself was embarrassingly tiny and it cost $15!
Any good restaurant review is a blend itself of several important factors ... food quality, value, service, ambience, etc. On the first two Tom Yum scores very poorly, their food is bland, overpriced and portions are much too small. As far as service and ambience, we were there during dinner time on a Friday night and there were diners at only one table, otherwise the place was dead. As was the single employee who looked like he wished he was somewhere else, anywhere else but there - he made me feel completely unwelcome. The restaurant itself is located in a seedy (and almost scary) strip mall next to a smelly cowboy bar with "characters" hanging around everywhere in the parking lot, definitely not a family friendly environment after dark.
I sense maybe the new owners may be franchise entrepreneurs looking for expansion opportunities but that's just a guess based on their over-the-top over-promising (and expensive looking) website that seems to have no correlation to the actual restaurant. They rely on a grossly inaccurate automated Grubhub/Yelp ordering system that advised us that it would take 40 minutes to prepare our take-out meal. Being our first time there we arrived very early only to find our bag of food already sitting on the counter waiting for us. Apparently the automated system is not synchronized in any way to actual restaurant conditions.
I struggled to find a reason to give them as high as 3-stars for "average" but I couldn't do that and still keep my review honest. What absolutely kills them is price and the nail that seals it is that it is the worst Thai food I've ever had. I won't be back.
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