The restaurant here is pretty fancy and nice, not at all a dive and the menu looked like an upscale bound book. The dishes were not your typical Thai food, they all had a slightly fancy twist to them (you won't find shrimp dumplings or fried tofu on this menu). Instead of drunken noodle with your choice of chicken, shrimp, or tofu, it came with either soft shell crab or sea bass. I'm actually not opposed to the more upscale tilt of the food, but what was completely shocking was the price! The entrees were all almost $30 per dish and the appetizers were $12-$15. Given all the terrific, authentic Thai places in the city at very reasonable prices, I really don't get why a Thai place (granted it's nicer and offering slight higher quality food) would charge x3 the prices of other places. Now don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem paying that kind of money for food, but it's just on principle that I don't think Thai food falls in that category. Some foods that I would pay a lot of money for are: sushi, steak, lobster or game meats.
But that being said, the food was actually very good and I wish I could give this place a higher rating because the food was delicious. Jenn and I split the Northern Larb ($12), I got the Sea Bass Drunken Noodle ($28) and Jenn got the Crispy Duck ($26). The main reason we ordered the larb was because I had made it while I was in Thailand last year and I was curious to try it here as I haven't had it since last year. It was listed under salads but it clearly was not a salad (and I don't recall it being salad-esque when I made it). It's basically minced pork with lots of chilis, basil and other Thai herbs and spices. It was spiced perfectly...you could definitely taste the heat and the pork was cooked with not too much oil. But due to the minced texture, it was really hard to eat on its own and instead of lettuce cups they gave us some weird hard cabbage that didn't seem edible. What was really the star of the meal was the main entrees. I wasn't sure how they were going to incorporate sea bass into a drunken noodle dish, but they essentially lightly battered and fried a huge piece of sea bass and put it on a bed of sauced noodles. There were no veggies or other ingredients mixed in to the dish, but that turned out to be fine. The dish was most definitely the highest end drunken noodle dish I've ever had. The fish was tender and cooked to the right texture and the noodles were perfect...I most definitely didn't miss not having other ingredients on the dish. I was surprised at how incredibly filling it was. Normally any dish that has sea bass is tiny and not filling but I could barely finish the dish. I also tried Jenn's duck and it was amazing. Nice and juicy on the inside and very crispy but not dry on the outside. But what was the killer was the sauce. The Penanag curry sauce was good enough on its own. I could have just had a bowl of white rice covered in the sauce and I would have been perfectly happy.
So I'm torn that I had to give this place only a 3 when the food was close to a 4.5. What really just docked this place were the prices and the fact that I could barely hear or understand our waiter. I mean talk about a low/soft talker. I was 3 inches away from him and could barely hear him. One big mistake Jenn and I made was not getting an entire bottle of wine. Instead, we stupidly ordered 6 individual glasses at $12/glass where we probably could have spent much less to get the whole bottle (although I will say that they did end up just pouring the rest of the bottle and giving it to us). Luckily Jenn had a Living Social discount for $50 off, but the meal still cost us $62/pp (they included a 20% tip without telling us).
Photo Credit: Yelp
1 comment:
Hi Jenny,
We're so glad you liked the food here at Lotus of Siam! Thanks for reviewing us; we like to hear from our guests and we'll give your feedback special consideration. As you know, our rent is high here in NYC, but our appetizers range from $8-$15, and our entrees are mostly $28 and under. We love our food, too, so we want people to be able to afford it!
We do charge an automatic gratuity for large parties... but it sounds like there were just two of you. In that case, that may have been our mistake. I can't think of why you would be charged gratuity without being informed first. My apologies! Come by again and we would be delighted to offer you a glass of wine on the house. Ask for Robin!
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