I used to go to this place all the time when I was a student at UW-Madison. Food was awesome and in huge portions. I recently revisited this place when I was in Madtown again and I am sad to feel the need to downgrade my experience...
Environment wise, it's the same old - dark, not very clean and kinda smelly (mainly the mixture of foods). Service was also just like usual: because it's family owned and run, the kids help out a lot and therefore you may not get your water filled as frequently (or get your own water jug fast enough).
The appetizer fried tofu we had was a let-down. While four wedges for $2 wasn't bad, the tofu was particular sour and the oil that it was fried in was obviously "old" oil that was being used over and over again. Maybe the stuffed fried tofu would have been better, i don't know.
We had pad thai and the spicy plate. I feel like the pad thai was merely a smash of noodles, very little to none meat and bean sprout, and lots of sriracha sauce and potentially ketchup. It was also too moist to my tastes and for some reason they didn't have peanuts in it any more, taking away a layer of texture and flavors. The spicy plate was better on the other hand, although the medium to hot spicy level was not spicy enough. There were a lot of onions and not enough of other ingredients that made me want the dish such as Lao zucchini. There were lots of flavors in that dish including the coconut sauce but the different flavors were not blended very well so some abruptly overpowered the others at one bite or another...
Overall I'd recommend this place to anyone who loves Thai/Viet/Lao food in Madison. You can't beat the price and location (right off of State St) and there are a lot of dishes you can explore around in this dive-y restaurant. I hope they can keep up with the food quality because it's rare that they haven't been raising prices and downsizing food portions.