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| - Am neither Thai nor a monk nor a Buddhist. I'm a certified glutton though so food was the only reason I came to the Monastery for, for the very first time (I went on Sunday, the 28th of August). From my fond food experience on my frequent trips to the San Fernando Valley/North Hollywood's Wat Thai Buddhist Temple's weekend food fair, I was hoping (and expecting based on Yelp reviews) that Chaiya would deliver and be worth the trip (considering Vegas was experiencing 100plus degree summer heat.)
Parking wasn't too bad. In fact, there was ample. As I was walking in, I noticed their festival schedule posted so I updated and added on to my phone's reminder apps the dates of their future scheduled food fairs until December 18, 2016. As I entered the compound, there were, understandably, lines and cliques of people. Come to find out the lines were of people ordering and "not-too-amused" people waiting for their food. There's about 10 or fewer tables offering and selling very limited Thai dishes. There's, of course, the ubiquitous pad thai. There's few other more noodle dishes, moo yahng, papaya salad, vermicelli soup, fried battered bananas/taro/yam, some desserts and fresh produce/herbs/plants. I queued and waited in in 4 different lines and was told by the cashiers that there's another 20 to 30-minute wait for the food (that's on top of the almost half an hour standing in line). That's an agonizing 1 1/2 hours just to place my orders. After which, I waited another hour or so while I joined the group of unhappy people blocking the cashier's tables and listened to their bitchings and whinings about the long wait and the heat. If the monks could only hear them nasty mouths!
Yelp reviewers were singing high praises for the authenticity of their pad thai so why not go for the "authentic" Chicken Pad Thai, along with som tum (papaya salad), moo yahng (pork satay) and banana fritters (my "to-go" dessert and for the road).
THE VERDICT: Pad thai came with a decent portion of cooked noodles and 3 chicken slices, a teaspoon of ground peanuts, a teaspoon of white sugar, some ground red pepper flakes, 13 bean sprouts, a 1/8 slice of lime. I couldn't believe I waited almost 45 minutes for a noodle dish I could've bought and enjoyed from a neighborhood Thai restaurant in Henderson. I didn't mix in the sugar that came with it and yet it came out and tasted overly sweet. Authentic Pad Thai would've been an interplay of what Thai food is known for ( i.e., interplay of at least three and up to four or five fundamental taste senses in each dish or the overall meal: sour, sweet, salty, bitter, and spicy). The pad thai i had was a "complex interplay" of 4!: sweet, very sweet, very very sweet, and oh so freaking sweet! I must've had 3 bites and chased it with papaya salad dressed with dark brown fish anchovy sauce akin to the Filipino "bagoong isda" and not your typical Thai nam pla. In fairness, the som tum was decent, and so were the barbecued skewered meat . After a good 15 minutes, I grabbed the bag of banana fritters and left. I left hungry, wanting more and borderline hyperglycemic. It was not the same, not even close to Wat Thai Temple's. I had better. Not too happy but then again it was for a good cause and $25 more towards the monastery's mortgage fund.
EPILOGUE: As I was driving towards the main road, I stopped by the corner, turned my phone''s Reminders App and deleted the entry I made when I first walked in. And when I got home, the monks (blessed their holy virtuous hearts) got their revenge because when I opened the brown bag of what I thought were banana fritters, turned out to be a bag of fried but now soggy battered taro root!
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