Kinn Thai

Kinn Thai is one of the many new restaurants that have opened up in the Westfield Garden City shopping centre now that they've finished renovations! It's located in the outdoor food court where the movies are located in the older end of the shopping centre. VGirl and I decided to try it out during the extended opening hours just before Christmas! We weren't 100% sure what would be open during that time but we figured the restaurants at Garden City would be open a lot later to cope with the 38 non stop hours of shopping before Christmas!

The place is pretty dark, I only managed to get a few photos and then VGirl offered to take some photos behind me. Unfortunately, when she took these photos, they all included me in them so I had to delete them, plus they were super blurry. Note to myself, don't let VGirl take photos.

The bar runs along the side of the restaurant and is quite long!

At least this lantern photo is nice

Here is a copy of their online menu! There are a few dishes and drinks missing from it in comparison to the dine in menu. The dine in menu is quite pretty! A small leather bound menu with thick, glossy pages with an excellent summary of the dish and usually a picture to accompany it. They also have a neat little drinks menu as well with a lot of mocktails!

I picked this virgin strawberry daiquiri, it was made with pureed strawberries, cranberry juice and ice! I found it to taste exactly like the ingredients with a frappe like texture from the blended ice, it was very sweet and refreshing in the heat.

Yum!

I thought that VGirl and I were both ordering entrees so I got the crispy soft shell crab with papaya salad which was exactly like the name suggested with the addition of some green beans, tomato and roasted peanuts as well. I didn't realise until afterwards that she didn't get anything. The soft shell crab was delicious, crunchy, golden brown coating with the soft, sweet succulence of the crab flesh underneath. The papaya salad was quite large and plated off to one side so the dressing didn't soak into the crab. I found the dressing used to be mildly spicy and perfectly balanced between sweet, sour, salty and tangy. Even VGirl commented that it looked amazing and was a bit envious as I ate the salad, we both thought it was the perfect size to be a light meal rather than an entree,

So good!

As my main I got the gang phed ped yang, a red curry with roasted duck, cherry tomato, lychee, pineapple and basil leaves. The roasted duck was already deboned for me, I'm not sure how I feel about that because I love the depth of flavour and richness that bones lead to food when cooked. I suppose the bonus is that all my pieces of duck were all meat rather than bone and meat so that's something. There was quite a lot of fruit in my red curry and no other vegetables. There was ONE cherry tomato, a very large specimen about the size of a 50 cent piece, about five lychees that were sweet and delicious and lots of pieces of pineapple that a slightly fermented flavour to them. The red curry had a constant mild burn, enough to make you notice but not enough that you stopped to allow the burn to cool off. I think they also garnished with coconut cream for some reason? Those little white squiggles in the bottom right of my picture. I'm not sure why they would do this. 

Hmm~ not bad I suppose

VGirl felt like a curry and ordered a vegetarian green curry that had lots of vegetables in it such as apple eggplant, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, beans, lots of kaffir lime leaves, Thai basil and red chillis were used as garnish. Her curry was just as hot as mine I think, she had a hard time getting through it and drank copious amounts of water to cool off. She's not very good with spice, she's the kind of girl who orders lemon and herb at Nandos. She remarked that even though she was very full from the serve that she got, it was quite small portion sizing. I had to agree since my meal would've been only good for one person and if I had to share, I would have only done so begrudgingly due to how little I received in my dish.

We had to order rice separately on the side, at $3 a serve. It didn't seem like very much but it filled the two of us up. I wish there was more because the curry sauces were so damn good soaked into the rice. 

SIDE RICE

Kinn Thai
Atmosphere: 6, very busy place but slightly dark at night time. 
Service: 8, very prompt and efficient service. There's always staff doing laps of the floor, topping up water and clearing away dishes very efficiently.
Food: 8, delicious if small portioned and a bit expensive as a result. I think this place would be good for someone who wanted to go out for Thai and didn't want to share their food, because that would be the perfect portion size then. For me, that's the complete opposite of what I want in Thai food because I want to eat until I nearly throw up and then take home leftovers for the price of about $20 split between each diner.The entrees are a wonderful size and I'd highly recommend that soft shell crab and papaya salad that I got. It's not super authentic Thai, but its not bad either with that being said.