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| - We saw the review in the local paper and decided to try it out. We just moved back to the states from spending a couple of years in Vietnam and my wife is a Vietnamese food blogger and cookbook author so we've got some appreciation of SE Asian food. We've also spent quite a bit of time in Thailand solely to eat.
First the good:
1. The ambiance of the restaurant is nice and there is a charming outdoor seating area.
2. Someone there really loves Doraemon, the robot cat from the future who is also very popular all over SE Asia but is probably unknown by most in the West. Cute touch.
3. The serving staff is ultra-attentive and kind. I'm giving 4 stars for them, otherwise it would be 3.
4. The flavor of my pork belly dish was really good, with a nice smoky aroma.
5. Back to the servers, they topped my water off religiously. Cheers to them!
6. Nice bathrooms. Clean and well-designed.
7. Good parking and street access
Now the bad:
1. As others have noted we paid more for Pad Thai than I have paid anywhere, including NYC, and the portion size will leave you still hungry at the end. This was true for my 95lb wife who is not a big eater by any means.
My meal was similar in size and left me needing something more, although not at the prices this place charges. Either the portions need to increase or the price needs to decrease for this to feel like a reasonable deal.
2. The Pad Thai was just ok, and it included uncooked white scallions, which is a no-no. They should have used cooked chives. It was also missing tamarind sauce and the noodles were undercooked for legit Thai noodles and the vegetables were also undercooked and too hard for Pad Thai. It wasn't terrible but a standard $2 plate of real Pad Thai street food would have been a better standard to base their recipe on. Also, for Asian tastes it was very over-salted, which is unfortunately the standard for Asian food in Phoenix.
3. There were some interesting-looking small plates on the menu but at a high enough price that I wasn't interested enough to try one out.
4. The restaurant was moderately busy on a Thursday night, most indoor tables filled, but no diners waiting to be seated. We were told that they wouldn't be filling our food order for at least 40 minutes since the kitchen was so slammed. Having worked both front of house and back of house in popular restaurants, I would say this is pretty unacceptable level of performance for their kitchen. This will lose the restaurant money as people decide to leave (as we saw a couple of couples do) instead of wait so long for their food. We had to wait 40-50 minutes for our food. Real Thai food tends to come out quick, fresh and hot so I'm not sure why their cooks aren't up to the task to keep their kitchen humming along.
I think this place has potential, particularly with the great staff and building. Thai street food isn't difficult to prepare, so they just need to make some adjustments to reach the level of deliciousness that you can get on any street or even in the Central World mall food court in Bangkok. They also need to either add kitchen staff or get their staff trained in managing multiple orders at once and get an expediter or someone to help keep things running quicker in the back.
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