Tara Thai 4828 Bethesda Ave., Bethesda, MD 20814
I grew up in Bethesda but it's actually been years since I've eaten there since my mom moved to another surrounding suburb many years ago. The only time I really get an opportunity to eat in downtown Bethesda is when I'm in town for Christmas break. This year, I'm home for a week and it's great that I was able to meet up with so many of my close high school friends for a meal. Unfortunately, the meal was at Tara Thai...but really I was more looking forward to the company than the food.
To be honest, the food wasn't bad. It was just extremely uneventful and mundane. I hadn't been to Tara Thai in years and somehow I didn't remember it being so run of the mill, but then again that was almost 15 years ago. A bunch of my friends and I met up the day after Christmas and say able to get a table for 8 people pretty easily. The menu is actually pretty extensive and went on for several pages. We ordered a few orders of spring rolls ($5) to start and I got the Siamese Bay Noodles ($17) which consisted of broad noodles with mussels, squid, shrimp, string beans and topped with lump crabmeat. I don't know what everyone else ordered but I saw a few orders of pad thai and pad see ew. The spring rolls were fine, they look like they could have come from Costco and served with a sweet dipping sauce. Again totally fine...nothing wrong with it. I was excited for the noodles because I love a good wide noodle and I love seafood, so a combination of the two sounded great. The concept of the dish was great, but the problem was that it was totally over-sauced. All I could taste of the sauce, it just overpowered the entire dish and the sauce was too sweet. There was actually a good amount of seafood, about 4-5 pieces of each type of seafood which I appreciated. My one complaint about them would be that they were all a bit overcooked which made them a bit tough in texture. I didn't taste anyone else's dish, but the pad thai looked the opposite of my noodles in that it looked under-sauced and plain.
All in all, the meal didn't wow me in any way and the service was incredibly slow (although they were really nice). Luckily, it was just really nice to catch up with old friends, so that food didn't need to be the star of the night. The total bill was $24/pp with tax and tip.
Photo Credit: Yelp
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