Tangthai Restaurant

We went to Tangthai with another couple as we both had Social Shopper coupons. It was a Friday night and we’d not made a reservation but we probably only had to wait five minutes before we were seated.
We each ordered a dish for the four of us to all share. I pretty much always get the yellow curry with chicken and potatoes whenever I’m in a Thai restaurant (boring I know, but it is what it is). I was VERY disappointed. I’ve never seen this dish where the chicken came on the bone — it was essentially four drumsticks with some tiny pieces of potato and a bunch of onion in the yellow curry sauce.
Also ordered were Pad Thai and Swimming Rama as well as a prawn dish that our waitress recommended. Pad Thai and Rama were delicious! Prawns were also good but too much pineapple in that one for me personally. I don’t believe in meat with cooked fruit.
Tangthai appears to be a family run place; there was a very cute and tiny girl dressed in pyjamas that came up to our waitress as she took our order. That said, we had pretty good service. At one point, my friend needed a water refill and had to flag a guy down but other than that was good.
Not sure I’d go back. Maybe for lunch and I’d get the Pad Thai. I’ll hafta get my yellow curry fix elsewhere.
[note: i just discovered this review in my drafts… didn’t realise i’d not posted it… so full disclosure, it was quite a while aqo that we went — a year or longer? — so may have improved since then… or not]

I went in hungry, but left unsatisfied in this restaurant where O Thai Cuisine used to reside.
I felt like I was participating in the real version of «Dinner Dash» today. It doesn’t reflect well on the proprietor when there’s only one server to tend to all of the patrons on a Friday night. And by the crawling speed of when the dishes were brought to the tables, it seemed there was also only one cook. With the amount of customers walking in, they kept on missing their mark.
It was a painfully slow service. The time it took to have the waiter get back to us to take our order was too much of a wait that we had to finally flag him down.
Dish 1: Tom Kha Kai — chicken soup in coconut base. It arrived in a very small bowl good for one. The taste was good, but I was thinking if the cook spilled too much fish sauce on it as it was salty.
Dish 2: Pandan Chicken — marinated chicken wrapped in pandan leaves which are then usually fried. The chicken itself was not tasty and was over-​cooked. Pandan leaves usually impart their essence to the dish, but not in this case. The only salvation was the sweet palm sugar dipping sauce to make the chicken more palatable.
Dish 3: Pad Priew Wan Tofu — fried tofu bits in a sweet and sour sauce in what looks and tastes like a mix of tomato, tamarind and fish sauce. This dish could have been a winner except that it was… surprise…too salty. Otherwise, nice balance of ingredients and spices.
Dish 4: Pad Thai Krung Tep — traditional tamarind-​based sauce (versus their Pad Thai Goong Sod in a contemporary tomato-​based sauce). The noodles were perfectly cooked. It was a little bit bland in such a way that I could not appreciate the nature of the tamarind ingredient perhaps maybe because the fish sauce was overpowering the dishes.
As you have seen, the dishes were too salty. When I go to a Thai restaurant, I always see to it that they provide condiments and spices by the table side so I can increase the salt and hotness of the dish. This was the first Thai restaurant I’ve been to that had consistently too much fish sauce in each dish and not enough spice.
The service was just going downhill every minute we were there. He was trying real hard to refill the tables with water, but toward the end he just had to stop providing good service because the customer base was overwhelming him.
Our dishes were by our table, but we had to remind him of our missing rice just because it was painful to munch on the salty dishes alone.
He gave up and finally handed us our cheque by the table on his own free will even as we were not done with our dishes and we wanted to order dessert.
We felt his pain and decided to leave it at that. Paid our bill and grabbed our dessert elsewhere.
Bottomline: Mediocre food and non-​stellar service. For this kind of pricing, I would have expected more. A lot more.