Restaurant Review: The Thai House

This past Friday marked my third visit to The Thai House and oh how I love it. Indian aside, Thai appears to be the most common foreign cuisine here, but most of the Thai restaurants are of the Thai/Chinese combination variety that put "take away" menus in your mailbox on a weekly basis.

I would categorize The Thai House as "upscale Thai" based on the service, atmosphere, and price$$$. The staff always seem to remember us, but this may be because everyone in the UK thinks Eliot looks like David Schwimmer. (So much so that he has been stopped to take pictures with adoring fans, for example.) The Thai House takes the service-by-the-masses approach and our usual visit brings at least four different individuals -- dressed in blue satin fabrics -- to our table. The restaurant has a colonial-like feeling, which is, I suppose, quite fitting.

We ordered a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc (£16.50) and a bottle of water (£2.95!). We started with the Pak Joop Bang Tord, Thai-style vegetable tempura (£4.95), and Kanom Jeep, pork and prawn dumplings (£5.50). Both dishes were excellent. The tempura portion was very generous and consisted of mushrooms, broccoli, snap peas, and baby corn(!). The breading was perhaps a little heavy, but really there are worse problems in the world. The dumplings were very nice and had a lovely little crunch from the water chestnuts.

Then we ordered the dish that "people travel miles for": the Bed Tord Grob, crispy fried duck with tamarind sauce (£11.50). This dish has been ordered all three times that I've been (and all five times Eliot has been). And it is well worth our .75-mile walk. The duck is cut into small slender pieces and crisped just the right amount. The sauce is incredible and it's all garnished with tiny slivers of crunchy seaweed. We never leave anything on the plate. We decided to branch out from our usual green curry with bean curd to try the Gang Makua, spicy aubergine (eggplant) curry (£8.50), and boy was it spicy (which is VERY unusual for the UK) and man was it delicious! I needed all of my bowl of rice (£2.25 per person!) to cool the fire.

We split the mango and coconut ice cream dessert (£4.25), which was tasty and probably unnecessary.

So, we had another wonderful, grade A meal at The Thai House. The only downfall (and it is quite the fall), was the £65 ($130) bill, which included a £5 tip (we still haven't figured out if and how much we are supposed to tip). Perhaps if I think of The Thai House as the Gary Danko of Cardiff it will help...