My friends and I decided to have dinner at Nittaya's as we wanted to try a restaurant we had never been to before and Nittaya's menu of Thai inspired tapas was intriguing.
Nittaya's is a small, nicely appointed restaurant on the corner of Rampart and Lake Mead. The restaurant has a long bar with comfortable looking leather stools and just eleven tables set with little oil burning candles, white table clothes and fresh flowers. When we arrived on a Monday night, at 5:00 pm, we were the first guests to be seated, but by the time we left two hours later, the place was nearly full.
Service was wonderful. Our severs were friendly, knowledgeable of the menu items, prompt, and unobtrusive. Our server even asked if we'd like to sample the wine we decided on before we committed to order it.
Nittaya's has two menus, one for traditional choices of appetizers, salads and entrees, and a tapas menu featuring a vast selection of Thai inspired little dishes. The restaurant also serves a decent selection of wine and beer. My friends and I decided to order several dishes from the Tapas menu and share them.
We ordered the "World Famous Spinach Salad", bbq ribs with five spice, curry potato puffs, mango shrimp, beef jerky, pork egg rolls, and crab wontons. The true winner in all of those selections was the spinach salad which wasn't really a salad. It was tempura fried spinach leaves served with a tangy sauce that contained cashews and chicken. It was absolutely delicious and I highly recommend anyone who dines at Nittaya's to try it. The beef jerky was also good and not like traditional tough dry slices of beef. The jerky was tender, tangy marinated pieces of beef with a good amount of heat. I enjoyed this dish very much, but one of my dining companions thought it had a little too much heat. The mango shrimp were ok. They were small size, shelled shrimp wrapped in bacon and served with a creamy mango sauce. They were good, but would have been better if the shrimp were bigger and the bacon a little less overpowering. The crab wontons and egg rolls were good but did not stand apart from those sold at chain take-out restaurants. Two of the dishes we had were disappointing, with the ribs having a nice flavor, but being so tough they required a knife to eat, and even then took a little work to get the meat off the bone, and the curry potato puffs (curry flavored mashed potatoes, shaped into little semi circles, battered and deep fried), being so sweet they bordered on being candy.
For dessert we tried the Thai donuts and coconut ice cream. Both were heavenly. The donuts were little fried rounds of fluffy light and incredibly delicious dough that was not overly sweet, and were served with a caramel sauce which added just enough sweetness to make them one of the most delicious donuts I've ever eaten. I would love it if Nittaya's sold these exceptional little bites by the bag full with a generous dusting of powdered sugar as I would.buy them daily. The coconut ice cream was served in a pretty little covered pewter bowl. The texture was somewhere between an ice cream and a sorbet, and was so delicious and bursting with coconut flavor that I wished I could have bought a quart to take home.
The price for dinner for the three of us, which included several rounds of wine and beer, was $130.
Overall, I liked Nittayas and will return to try other dishes on the menu and to have those incredible donuts and coconut ice cream again.