It was yet another gorgeous fall day here in Sonoma County so we decided to take advantage of the weather and head out to lunch.  We chose a place we’d been to many, many times.  Thai Cuisine is in a large, old Victorian house that’s been converted to other uses.  The restaurant occupies the bottom floor.  We’d always had great food and friendly service there, so we were a bit taken aback to realize that the restaurant had changed owners.  Nevertheless, we decided to try it out.

Our waitress greeted us and led us to a table.  Her very limited English had her struggling to understand our request for a highchair, but her friendly manner still made a good first impression.  Unfortunately, the highchair itself changed the mood.  It was really, really dirty.  Turned the anti-bacterial wipe we cleaned it with gray kind of dirty.  Now, in fairness, most restaurant highchairs could really use a good cleaning, unfortunately.  But this one was particularly bad – not a great first impression especially when you’re about to eat somewhere.

The menu was fairly limited.  It was lunch time, and they had a few lunch specials which were reasonably priced.  There were eight items to choose from of which you could mix and match any two for $8.50 or have a single item for $7.50.  The meal choices each came with a choice of tofu, chicken, pork or beef.  Half of the list was designated as spicy, although they were able to tone down the spiciness when asked.  Despite the lack of choice, we both found something that sounded good and ordered. 

The lunch specials include a small bowl of soup which arrived pleasantly hot but not overly so.  The soup was vegetarian and contained tofu, cabbage and carrots in a coconut milk base.  It was tasty enough, but nothing particularly special. 

Wendy chose the pumpkin curry with tofu.  She ordered it extremely mild (especially since our daughter was sharing it with her).  It still had a fair kick to it, but luckily our toddler has been known to eat mild hot peppers and it was fine.  The curry itself was terrible, though.  The pumpkin wasn’t cooked enough and was still crunchy!  There was an odd peanut flavor to the sauce which isn’t something we’ve had with other pumpkin curries.  The serving was quite small, even given that it was a lunch special.

Her second item was the vegetarian egg rolls.  These were hot and crispy and obviously fresh, but the positives stopped there.  They were tasteless with an odd pastiness to them.  The dipping sauce was non-descript and sadly didn’t do anything to help matters, either. 

Ian ordered the pumpkin curry, too, but with the chicken.  He found the chicken tasted very processed and wasn’t good, but he didn’t mind the sauce.  It was slightly spicier than the mild version that Wendy ordered.  He also had the eggplant with beef.  The beef was terrible and the hot peppers were sadly the only taste the dish had.

We washed it all down with a couple of Thai iced teas, $2.50USD/each.  These were a sweeter note to the meal – they were delicious and tasted as you would expect a good ice tea to.  Unfortunately, that clearly isn’t enough to convince us to go back.  We will miss our favorite lunches at the old Thai Cuisine, but next time the urge for Thai food hits, we’ll be headed to Thai Issan or Lynn’s Thai Restaurant!