Uncle Boons Visited 7/10/2013 3.5 Forks

Uncle Boons 7 Spring St.(between Bowery & Elizabeth St), New York, NY 10012

The trend of hipster expensive Asian food a la of Mission Chinese and Pok Pok continues with the opening of Uncle Boons and frankly, I'm starting to get sick of all this hype.  Uncle Boons has pretty great pedigreed (owners came from Per Se) and while the food was good, there's just something about waiting almost an hour in line for food that starts in the $15-20 range, that is a bit tiring.  But I guess I'd rather wait for good Asian food instead of any other ethnic cuisine.  Nancy and I decided to try Uncle Boons on a Wednesday night at 6:30 hoping it wouldn't be too long of a wait.  So the one thing that really bothered me is that they wouldn't let me put our name in and tell me how long the wait is until the entire party was there.  I get it, but don't like it, when restaurants won't seat you until the whole party is there, but to not even let you put your name and get a time estimate (when you KNOW it'll be long) is totally ridiculous.  Luckily, Nancy was right behind me and they told us it would be a 45 minute wait.  By the time 20 minutes had gone by, the hostess was quoting 3 hours to people.  To lesson learned, get there before 7pm if you don't want to be quoted a ridiculous wait time.  We grabbed two seats at the bar and began our wait.  A word to anyone who plans to eat there in the summer, the A/C doesn't really work in the front part of the restaurant, so be prepared to sweat while you wait by the bar or eat at one of the 2 tops in the front of the restaurant.  I had to cool down with a beer slushie ($7) which was basically a frozen Chang beer served with a straw - love it.  Of course by the time our table was ready, our only choice was the two top right in front of the restaurant away from any A/C.  We were sweating before we could even put our drink orders in.

The menu here is much more authentic Thai food than you'll find at your regular Thai place.  You won't find any pad thai or eggplant and tofu here.  We started with the Mee Krob ($14) which was spicy sweetbreads with crispy noodle salad-peanuts, sawtooth herb and tamarind sauce, the Kao Pat Pu ($25) which was crab fried rice with egg, cilantro and lime, and the Khao Soi Kaa Kai ($20) which was Northern style golden curry with egg noodles, chicken leg, pickled mustard greens and coconut milk.  Even though I've had sweetbreads before, the concept of them still kind of creep me out, but I was ready for them.  They were actually the favorite part of my meal!  I know this is such a cliche, but it really did taste like chicken - crispy fried chicken nuggets.  It's juicy and moist on the inside and lightly battered fried on the outside and tossed in salt and pepper.  It was delicious and I could have popped more of them in my mouth.  It really wasn't that spicy but it had enough heat that the salad cooled my mouth a bit and ended with a tang from the tamarind sauce.  Next the two main entrees came out at the same time.  Size-wise I thought the fried rice portion was pretty small considering it was $25.  The flavor was great, the rice was cooked to the right texture and they clearly used fresh crab meat - I just wished there was more of it.  We had poured a spicy lime-cilantro dressing on top of it and that really took the spice flavor up a notch.  But what really kicked my ass spice-wise was the golden curry.  It wasn't the curry itself but the red chili sauce that came with it.  I thought I would be bold and poured a bunch of that on my curry and good god, my mouth probably could have caught on fire at that point.  The curry was nice and thick from the coconut milk and the chicken leg was extremely tender.  I was going to ask for a knife to cut the chicken but it was so tender that you only needed the fork and the entire thing fell apart to the bone.  I wish there was more than 1 chicken leg as that's not really enough meat for two people.  The curry was served over a bed of thick egg noodles but there wasn't enough noodles in the dish for two people either.  By the end of the meal, I was sweating from the heat of the restaurant and from the spiciness of the curry dish and  I was just so uncomfortable and cranky that I couldn't wait to get out of there.  

After having a few days to cool down and think about my meal, I do think that all the dishes had a lot of flavor and were very solid non-your regular Thai dishes.  The sweetbreads were particularly delicious and I loved that the fried rice had real chunks of fresh crab meat but I did find the prices to be about $5-9 more than it needed to be.  The food is definitely a notch above your average corner Thai place but it's still hard for me to justify spending $50 on Thai food no matter how good it is.  The lack of A/C probably made me a lot crankier than I would have been if I had been sitting the back air conditioned room, so you should probably take this review with a grain of salt.  Total bill:  $50/pp with tax and tip.

Photo Credit: Yelp