Patsara Thai Restaurant - New Westminster

I was out for a walk with a friend one day in New Westminster and he pointed out that there was a Thai restaurant in the purple building.  Wow, I was quite surprised it was a restaurant as there were hardly any signs or menus on the building to indicate that it was a restaurant.  I went inside to take a copy of their menu home to view.  Immediately I saw they had quite a good selection of value lunch specials for $8.50.

I headed back there a week later with some friends to try out the place.

The interior looks clean and modern with some hints of Thai ornaments decorating the restaurant.

This is their lunch special menu with pictures:

All of the lunch special meals include a free spring roll. 

It's a vegetarian spring roll with assorted veggies and vermicelli. The spring roll tasted quite good as it was fresh out the fryer and was not overly cooked.

For most of the lunch meals, you can choose your mean (beef/pork/chicken). some you can choose shrimp.  The server also asked our preference for spiciness (mild/medium/hot).

This is the pad thai with shrimp:

This was a good lunch size portion for one person.  It came out steaming hot.  I did not try the pad thai but the comment I head  was that it was a bit too salty.

This is the Panang curry with beef. 

We were unsure what this was since it looked similar to the red curry from the pictures.  The server explained it contained extra spices as well as some cream.

I asked for medium spicy.  It also came piping hot with a good size bowl of rice.The curry was very creamy, a bit of an orange colour which reminded me of a squash soup.  It had a deep taste and smell from the extra herbs.  Overall the flavour was good as long as you have it with rice.  It is a bit salty too though.  But the rice helps dilute the saltiness.   The beef was a tad too chewy.  I'm not sure of the beef used, but it tasted like the type used for beef fried noodle at Chinese places.

This is the lettuce wrap with chicken.  It was not from the special lunch menu.

It was also a good sized portion.

Finally this is just another shot of the spring rolls when ordered separately as an appetizer.  It includes 4 pieces as well as a small salad on the side. 

The service here was good as the servers were quite attentive and kept our waters topped up.  The food also came out fast and fresh. We knew the food was fresh as we can hear the food getting fried up from the kitchen in the woks.  Some of the dishes were a bit too salty though so it masked the better tasting curry spices. 

However we are not deterred at all. We will still come back to try other dishes but I think I would request less salt at the time of ordering just to be safe next time.

This place has good value choices for lunch and looking at their regular dinner, the prices are not over the top either.

SFDD gives 3.5 out of 5 Delights.

Thai Box 2Go - New Westminster

Thai Box is a small family run Thai restaurant along 6th St in New West. We got there just past noon on Friday for lunch and found the restaurant was rather quiet so we had our pick of seats.  You can find plenty of street parking in the residential side streets.  It’s pay parking if you want to park right outside the restaurant.

The restaurant had lot of Thai decorations all around.

We saw their menu ahead of time and were targeting their $10 set lunch specials. 

There were 4 of us and we all chose something different.

With each dish, you can choose your meat or vegetarian option.  All of the dishes we ordered came with 2 fried dumplings.

Pad Thai with chicken:

The pad thai was not flavoured very well. It was way too sweet.  The noodles were not too overcooked while portion wise, it was reasonable for $10 lunch 

This is the yellow curry chicken. 

It includes a serving of rice.  My lunch mates commented that it was good.

This one is the green curry chicken and my lunch mate also mentioned it was good.

Thai Box had nice presentation for their dishes.  Their prices were reasonable and the server was very polite. They even offered to split the bill for us.  As a bonus they accept credit cards which is rare for Asian restaurants.  The pad thai can use some improvement in terms of flavor balancing.

SFDD gives 3 out of 5 Delights.

IPOH Asian House - Vancouver

There are a couple of restaurants along Hastings just between Victoria and Nanaimo that has been coming and going in terms of ownership over the years. 

IPOH converted from Hong Kong style food to Chinese food to now Asian - Malay style food.  The previous changes did not include any renos so it always seemed to look the same inside.  The owners of IPOH however appear to have done a rather significant makeover making it a bit more modern.

We went at about 11:00am on Sunday morning just after it opened for the lunch so there were plenty of tables available.  There lunch menu was focussed on Malay-Singapore style Asian food.

The first thing I noticed was that the pricing was rather inexpensive when compared to places like Thai House or Tropika.  There was quite a bit to choose from including a lunch special section where a drink was included.  Usually the lunch specials are smaller, so when I ordered, I specifically pointed to the regular priced section thinking we would get a bigger portion to share amongst the three of us.  The waitress told us it is the same size as the special price so that is what we ordered from.

We wanted to start with the special appetizer platter.  There is a special where you can choose 3 appetizer items from the list to make your platter.  We chose the beef and chicken kebab, chicken wings and Malay pancake.  Unfortunately, the appetizer came last.  In fact it came quite late in the game when we were already halfway through our main dishes.

Anyhow, this was a good value platter.  The Chicken and beef however was a bit too bland. The chicken wings were juicy and was also a bit on the bland side but was passable.  If there was more flavour in the curry sauce then that would have made up for it but it was also bland as well without much spicy curry kick as one would expect.

The Pad Thai came first and was a reasonable size for the price.

This had the right amount of sweet/sour/spicyness to it.  The noodle component was also well prepared and was not mushy despite the amount of sauce it was made with.

Next came the Thai fried rice.  It had a variety of items inside including shrimp, chicken, cucumber and veggies.  This would have been better if it had more spicyness to it.  Overall it was OK as it was fresh off the wok and the rice had the right texture to it.

The drinks were typical and nothing special so we won’t write anything about it.  I would have preferred to opt out on the drink to get a bigger portion but that was not available as an option. 

Overall, the service was good and the food came fast.  My only gripe was the appetizers coming last and the blandness of the meat and curry sauce on the appetizer platter.  Prices are very good for what you get.

In the evening they have Chinese style dinner so we will blog about that later as we had a chance to try that too.

SFDD gives 3.25 out of 4 Delights.

Thai House - Richmond

We had out of town guests tonight so we decided to take them out for some Thai food.  We chose Thai House Richmond since it was close by and we had an entertainment coupon for a free entree.  Thai House has several locations in the lower mainland.  The Richmond location is at: 129-4940 No. 3 Rd Richmond, BC within a strip mall just across the street from MacD’s and Lansdowne Mall.

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We made reservations and did not have to wait when we got there.  We were quickly seated and water was brought to us promptly.  They had quite a vast selection of dishes on the menu so it would be hard for the indecisive to pick out something to eat.

For starters we ordered crab cakes and Thai satay chicken.  There were two large pieces of crab cakes.  They were fried in a light tempura-like batter.  It came with a sweet/sour/spicy dip.

The satay chicken was grilled and came with a peanut sauce and a tiny side salad composed mostly of red onions in a very sweet vinaigrette type of dressing.  We thought the peanut sauce complimented the chicken quite well.  One problem we had was that one strip of the chicken seemed to be a bit too pink.  We asked the waiter to replace it for us and it was done quite promptly and politely.

We ordered three main dishes to share among the four of us.  The first was Pad Thai.  This is a Thai rice noodle fried with tomato sauce and seafood.  As you can see there are lots of raw bean spouts to top this dish.  This was sweet and sour and the noodles had just the right tenderness for our taste.

 

The next item was a pineapple fried rice.  This was a fried rice served in a hollowed out pineapple skin.  Yellow ginger rice was used to fry it with raisins, seafood and lots of pineapple pieces.  There was so much rice that it overflowed out of the pineapple.  We were wondering if the pineapples used in this dish was actually from that pineapple shell it was served in.  Anyone know?

Lastly, we ordered the green curry chicken.  Thai curry is a bit different than others because it is very watery but contains lots of ingredients.  This one had many pieces of chicken breast, green pepper, onions and eggplant. 

Tonight’s green curry seemed to be more spicy than usual, but still very flavorful.  Rice had to be ordered separately.

Prices are quite reasonable at Thai House but the entertainment coupon was certainly an added bonus.  Aside from the raw piece of satay chicken, service was friendly and prompt and the facilities were quite nice to enjoy a meal out with family.

For tonight’s meal:

SFDD gives 4.75 out of 5 delights.