Inter Selects

Portion size was adequate, although they don’t put a lot of tofu or chicken in their food, its the noodles that i adore, i don’t like their Pad Thai because its super sweet, but i usual get the Pad See U and Pad Kee Mao, my two favorite dishes in Thai Cuisine. Friendly Staff, and very loyal. i will do anything to keep these guys in business, even if the food was horrible.
Plenty of aroused taste buds from here, and when im close to that area i never think twice.
And for you people who don’t have a good taste in food, and like to go the trendy places that everybody else goes too, you might as well grab a burger from Mc-​Ds.

Inter Selects is one of the few carts in the pod open at the time of day I find myself there, 5:30 pm.
The wait was a solid 15 minutes for my phad thai and it was clearly made with fish sauce. I know that’s not inherently a bad thing, but I am not a fan of fish sauce. By the time I got my food I didn’t have time to eat it. I stashed it in my car and when to my class. Now my car smells like fish sause as does my microwave since I had to reheat the meal later on.
The portion was huge, which I guess is a good thing if you’re willing to eat leftover fish sauce phad thai.

This cart has closed and been taken over by Krua Bangkok.

You know what breaks my little food-​cart-​loving heart more than anything else? When a place looks so promising and is staffed by the nicest people and then leaves me, post-​meal, eyeing the bathroom like a long-​lost lover.
I truly love the guy who runs this place. At least, the person I’ve interacted with on each separate occasion. I also love their variety of dishes, their vegan-​friendly nature, their willingness to spice my food to mega-​hot-​nuclear-​fallout levels, and all the photos!
The first dish I ordered (the pra ram, I believe) was quite tasty. Then again, it’s very difficult to screw up steamed vegetables with rice noodles and peanut sauce. The second time I opted for the drunken noodles.
Um.
I get nervous when my food is sitting in a two inch pool (nay, ocean) of oil. This was literally the oiliest thing I’ve ever eaten. I barely had to chew my food as it all slid down my throat at a disturbing speed. The flavor was somewhere there, underneath all that grease, but I had difficulty locating it.
I still get a little nauseating when I think about the percentage of it that I actually consumed. It should never have happened. I consider it a dark cloud hovering over my usual good taste (and food-​related judgment.) My time with their drunken noodles is very much like that morning in college where you wake up next to someone who you could SWEAR was hot the night before. Walking to the trashcan to dispose of the remnants of my meal was only missing smeared eyeliner and an inside-​out t-​shirt.
Sad times, indeed.

In the growing PSU cart scene on SW Fourth there is a distinct excess of Mexican and Thai options. Of each of these there has to be one worth keeping and a couple worth replacing with, say Ethiopian or Croatian… something not just like what’s next door.
With four Thai places to choose from, I spun the barrel and just went where they had Pad Kee Mao and no line. Hmm. about the no line part… maybe I should take that as a warning?
The service was pleasant enough and the dish took a reasonable amount of time to prepare. When I got to the fountain and popped open the plastic clamshell I found a big mass of red/​orange noodles with red bell peppers, some bits of chicken and a pretty scallion garnish. But was this Pad Kee Mao? The overriding distinction of the dish should be lots of fresh basil. After some digging around I found the single leaf of basil in the whole dish.
I could just about let it go they almost forget to add basil, but the meal was mostly noodles and they were, in a word, mushy. There was one bunch glommed together and I just had to set that aside.
It wasn’t a bad meal, really. It was okay. But with three other options to check out in the Thai department on this block alone, well, the prospects of me getting back to give Inter Selects another shot are looking dim.