Kai Gai Thai Restaurant

This was VGirl's 22nd birthday dinner with myself, our Mama Pham and our aunt. VGirl picked this place that she had gone to the previous night for her birthday dinner with her friends.

This place!

We decided to just grab some water and green tea. My teapot was quite cute as was our little rooster cups, however the inside of my cup was disgustingly grimy. I was very reluctant to drink out of it. I forgot to take a photo though.

Green tea!

Its cute at least?

We decided to get some entrees to start things off, vegetarian curry puffs and vegetarian spring rolls. I was dreaming of Mons Ban Sabai Thai's perfect golden brown curry puffs from the 10th anniversary dinner that I was invited to a few weeks before my sister's birthday. Those ones were super crisp, golden brown shells around meltingly soft, potato, chicken and onion curry. These ones had a quite potato, pea and corn mix. The spring rolls have a mix of cabbage, onion and carrot mixture. There was a serve of six spring rolls but they were very measly in filling, very thin and not very appealing.

Sad ):

This was a vegetarian oyster sauce stir fry, it contained beans, zucchini, carrot, onion, red and green capsicum as well as mushrooms. The oyster sauce was quite salty and wasn't well liked by anyone.

Oyster sauce!

I decided to get rice to share. It was a very large portion of fluffy, fragrant, long grain jasmine rice.

Rice~

The bowl was very pretty and I remember Mama Pham laughing at me for taking photos of everything.

Silver inlay

I got the beef massaman curry for us to share, it came with large chunks of potato, sliced pieces of tough beef and a thick, coconut flavoured curry sauce. The flavour of the sauce was lovely, with a rich, thick, coconut that coated the rice grains lovingly. The potato was soft but the beef hadn't been cooked long enough to be meltingly tender, soft and falling apart. I found the beef was an obvious let down, but we all agreed that the sauce was tasty over the steamed rice and that it was a shame that the beef wasn't cooked as well as it should have been.

Sad beef  ):

VGirl got the satay sauce stirfry, apparently she wanted to order this on the previous night and had gotten something else instead. She said that she really enjoyed the satay sauce and she scraped it off the top and ate it all by herself. When the satay sauce had been removed, the rest of the sauce at the bottom of the stirfry tasted surprisingly a lot like the oyster sauce stirfry.

Satay sauce is good?

We got some filleted barramundi fillets, it was one of the chef specials and it was served on a bed of the same vegetables as used in the stir fry meals. I wasn't sure why I was under the impression that it was served on the bone. We were a bit disappointed when it arrived to be honest, the fish was a bit dry and not very flavoursome.

Blergh

We got chicken pad thai to compare against others we've had in the past. It had bean sprouts, tofu, prawns, garlic, onions and some garlic chives. We found the balance of flavours to be very good, a nice mix between sour, salty and sweet. The most unfortunate thing about this dish was the very, very firm noodles, they were under cooked and very chewy. We found this to be a deal breaker as the noodles are one of the best parts of the whole thing.

So close, yet so far

My aunt decided to get the salt and pepper soft shell crab with me, it was slightly greasy mouth feel and every bite was greasy. I don't know if its because we were full but for once I didn't like this soft shell crab, and I seriously love it.

Kai Gai Thai Restaurant
Atmosphere: 3, dead quiet. We were the only people dining that night, there were like 4 other people that visited while we were here and they were just collecting take away.
Service: 5, the chef forgot our soft shell crab order until the last possible minute. We were the only people there so its sorta hard to gauge.
Food: 3, I would never go here again even under extreme duress.