Lantern Thai Visited 6/14/10 3 Forks

Lantern Thai  311 2nd Ave, (between 18th St & 19th St), New York, NY 10003

Lantern is one of those good decent standard fare Thai places in New York.  Nothing amazing but nothing terrible about it either. I will give the props for their website though, it's quite nicely designed. 


I met my friend Swaroopa there for dinner b/c for some reason we always pick Asian/Thai places around Union Square and I was all out of ideas, so I just randomly picked Lantern after reading about it on Yelp.  They do open up the floor to ceiling windows to give the restaurant a bigger/breezier feel.  The menu is what you would expect at a decent Thai place and the prices were right in-line with what you would expect ($9 for noodle dishes and $12+ for entrees).  I would have given this place a slightly higher rating except that in the beginning everyone ignored us except for the fact that the restaurant was almost empty.  I had to flag someone down twice which was kind of annoying. 


But after we ordered the service picked up and the wait staff seemed really nice.  I started with a green salad ($4) which was fine in taste but I was annoyed with the presentation.  They put it all in a small shallow bowl so it was hard to mix the dressing together (it ended up all at the bottom) and I could only eat one veggie at a time b/c they were all just piled on top of each other instead of being served in a slightly wider bowl for dispersion.  Swaroopa had ordered a coke but it turned out to just be flat Pepsi from the bar.  She tried to return it for canned soda, which they claim they did, but she still thought it tasted different.  For my main meal, I ordered the Drunken Noodle with Chicken ($9) - medium spicy.  The dish was very wet and covered in sauce which probably made it taste great but add about 1,000 calories to it. They spice level was actually quite balanced, I got a ting of heat but not too much that I couldn't finish my meal.  Swaroopa got the standard shrimp pad Thai and didn't seem to have any complaints about it.  


I didn't get to see the bill since Swaroopa treated me for my b-day but I'm guessing it couldn't have been much more than $30 total with tax and tip.  The one nice thing was that we stayed there talking for about an hour after we finished our meal without having anyone try to shoo us away.  If I was in the 'hood, I would go again, but there are just too many similar Thai places to really go out of my way for this place.