Princess Thai

I really wish Thai Phoenix wasn't located so far north side, I think its a really solid place to go to and everything I ate here was amazing! I went with my friend Dani and we loved everything we had here. I'd go here more frequently if it wasn't north side.

Parking is a bit shit, its near the Nandos! There is SOME parking but if its busy, I doubt you'd get a park directly in front of the store.

Here is their menu!

We went during lunch so they had an amazing lunch special that we took full advantage of. Below is a drink that I remember sounded so good that I wanted seconds after chugging it even before my food arrived. Dani got the same drink and loved it.

Yesssssss

We went with classic dishes for our entree, pork spring rolls and chicken satay. The pork spring rolls tasted very much like what Mama Pham makes at home, a good amount of pork mince and lots of veggies too. They had a really crispy shell despite being a bit pale. The chicken satay was really good, it had a nice char on the outside and the satay sauce was some of the best I've ever had. I could drink it or bath in it. We scraped that dish dry.

Yesssssss

Dani got the chicken and cashew stir fry with plain rice for her main meal. It had a ridiculous amount of birds eye chilli hidden within its depths. We hid them in the leftover pad thai for her boyfriend to accidentally eat haha. She said that she liked how much chicken there was as well as the plentiful cashews you can see in the picture. This was a lunch special for $10! Quite the bargain I think.

+_+ cashews

The real reason I went here is for their Princess Curry aka khao soi, Northern Thai style coconut curry with crispy egg noodles and your choice of chicken or beef. I got chicken and it was melt in your mouth, home cooked style tender! It came with the traditional accompaniments of mustard pickles, chilli oil and lemon wedges, so you adjust it to your preference. I really loved this version of the dish and it had Dani in heaven. She told me that since then she has gotten this every time she's gone there. This is also a lunch special!

Love you <3

Pad thai is always on your go to Thai dish list! This one was really good, well balanced, with tender noodles and lots of egg, tofu and chicken bits to pick at. We did not finish our meals so this became takeaway.

<3

Princess Thai
Atmosphere: 8, I really liked the interior, unfortunately, even during a weekday lunch there were too many people for me to get a good photograph!
Service: 6, friendly and very obliging staff.
Food: 9, really good Thai food. The lunch specials are super cheap and they offer my favourite Thai dish, khao soi, as one of their specials! What's not to love? I took off a point because they are located north side. I'm petty like that.

Yim Thai

S., and I went here before work one night. We ate dinner and then grabbed takeaway, green Thai curry and something else I forgot. We found the green Thai curry a bit too creamy and sweet, but everything else we had was soliddddd. I'm really sad that they don't do delivery though.

Yim Thai is located in a little shopping centre so there is heaps of parking here. Keep an eye out for Chompers, then you know you're there!

This place!

We couldn't get a table inside because they were all reserved. We had to sit outside.

):<

Also outside was pretty packed.

>:(

I hate metal serving dishes because they get too hot from the food. Here is their menu!

Boo!

S., got these coconut prawns. They were pretty huge and she said they were really good. I'm not a fan of prawns cause they are too much work for when I'm super hungry. Plus I'm stingy so I like to have every piece of meat available. You can see the generous coating of crunchy coconut on there too!

Solid

We also got the curry puffs to share, they are gorgeous little things, look at that perfect tuck! That is the perfection of an Asian auntie, who yells at her useless nieces and nephews. I know that feel because that's what Mama Pham does to me when I try and help her out in the kitchen. The contempt of lifelong skills. I smashed through these in seconds, I freaking love curry puffs, I love their sweet spiciness and mash of vegetables.

Perfect for kids

S., got the scallop and prawn prad prik kin aka a wild ginger and red curry paste stir fry, she could not stop talking about this dish. She got a huge amount of prawns and scallops that were cooked to a perfect juiciness. This is quite a favourite for everyone I've dined with. It comes with quite a large amount of vegetables in with it as well.

!

My honest to god favourite is the crispy pork belly cooked in chilli, coconut cream, young ginger, peppercorns and a ton of veggies, same as all their other stir fry dishes. I love how crispy the crackling is on this dish as well as the soft, melting flavour of the fat and meat pieces. Every time I've gone here, I've ordered this dish!

Hello delicious pork belly

We got som tum as our healthy shared entree. I love papaya salad from any country, the crunch of papaya, sweet cherry tomatoes, salty dried shrimp, the snap of green beans, peanuts, crunch, crunch, crunch! I love things that are crunchy and balanced between multiple flavours, plus its not a seasonal dish so I can get it all the time! The salad had a good amount of heat, enough that we noticed but not enough that we had to stop, it was wonderful! Every time I go here, I get at least two serves of this dish!

Yessss

Also I have been back here twice, for some reason I keep thinking I've already posted this review so I keep forgetting to take more photos. My bad guys, my bad. I went here with L., H., and S.Y, who all agreed it was some of the best Thai food they've had in Brisbane. Then H., went here with her husband and then proceeded to order the worse stuff in the restaurant according to her husband, apparently their jungle curry isn't great.

Yim Thai
Atmosphere: 7, a lovely and well decorated little place. Perfect for a family get together but not quite fancy enough for date night.
Service: 5, nothing stand out.
Food: 8, really good Thai food, just aim for the stir fries rather than the curries. Their som tum is a must!

Sing's Asian Kitchen Cooparoo

Jubi told me about this place a long time ago. Before when she lived up here in Brisbane before her family relocated to the Gold Coast, it was her local Asian takeaway joint!

This place!

Dr S., C., JGirl, VGirl and I all went together and we had to wait a while for a table since we hadn't bothered getting a reservation despite it being a Friday night haha. The restaurant was packed and they were also doing a roaring trade in takeaway food as we watched. I wish that they did delivery but I guess they would be incredibly busy doing that! Here is their menu!

Bamboo styled cutlery

I got the salt and pepper calamari as an entree. It was crispy tempura coating with five spice powder mixed, the onions were well caramelised and add some sweetness to the dish. Did you know JGirl doesn't eat seafood DESPITE BEING JAPANESE? She eats sashimi and that's it, everything else makes her nauseated, she understands the appeal but can't stomach the taste no matter how often she tries it. I pretty much ate this myself after I gave everyone a piece.

I also got wing wings aka deboned and pork mince stuffed chicken wings that have been deep fried. It tasted like someone had shoved a spring roll inside of a chicken wing, it consisted of pork mince, mung bean noodles, water chestnuts and coriander. The technique is wonderful but I'd rather eat something else for my entree.

Blurry

VGirl got the vegetarian pad thai, she said it was a touch sweet but hoovered it down very quickly. There were cashew pieces, carrot, zucchini, baby corn, green onions, kai lan and onion in this pad thai. It's an interesting mix since vegetarian pad thais are usually just chockers with tofu pieces, this is kinda like when your mum wants you to eat more veggies and adds whatever in.

Your basic stir fry mix

I got green thai curry fried rice, I really like the idea of frying in spice pastes into fried rice like how Indonesian fried rices are. I love that spicy tomato based paste. Anyway, I quite liked the heat in this green thai curry fried rice, it had a great aroma just like the regular curry. It had pieces of chicken breast, egg. kaffir lime and Thai basil pieces. I ended up taking this back to work for my dinner. The rice was a touch gluggy though.

A giant chunk of rice

The other girls, Dr S., C., and JGirl got this beef red curry to share as they had already eaten and really just wanted to chat and hang out with us. This had the same vegetables with the addition of broccoli, capsicum and snow peas so I guess that's actually a bigger change. The beef was tender and the sauce was average.

I've had better

I got the soft shell crab salad, I thought I had ordered the soft shell crab papaya salad so when I received this I was absolutely furious. I cannot review this at all because all my thoughts were tainted by the fact that I got a garden salad instead of a papaya salad. It's been over eight months and I still get angry thinking about, I don't know why I didn't send it back.

Stupid ThatSeriousGirl

Sings Asian Kitchen
Atmosphere: 5, busy Asian restaurant.
Service: 5, nothing spectacular. 
Food: 5, I didn't really enjoy my meal here and neither did the other girls. We were wondering why it was so busy considering what we got. Maybe we picked the wrong food, but there's plenty of other Asian/Thai restaurant other to go to.

2B Thai

VGirl and I had gone for a massive 5 hour shopping trip one weekend and so we decided to go out to dinner to celebrate surviving the trip. I paid for dinner since I had left my wallet behind in my car's glove compartment at VGirl's new house.

I agonised for ages over where we should go, VGirl being a pesky vegetarian and picky to boot. We ended up deciding to go for Thai food somewhere and I decided on 2B Thai because they had a cute name~!

The shop is really easy to find, just off Merthyr street in New Farm and right beside the Westpac branch.

This place!

It's not a particularly big restaurant, quite narrow with lots of footpath seating but it had a great relaxed dinner vibe. I can picture lots of family having their weekend treat eating out at this place on a lazy summer with cicadas chirping away and a cool breeze on the night air.

Your local Thai place?

Its only little!

Here is their menu!

VGirl got a blood orange Tiro drink and I got the Thai lychee iced tea. It was exactly like the name suggested, a strong black tea that was ridiculously sweet with a strong flavour of lychee, swimming in ice cubes and with some lychees on top. I love my drinks sweet, but this is tropical sweet, where you leisurely sweat away and allow the ice to dilute down the drink. I wasn't messing around so I went ahead and poured water in it to speed up the process.

So sweet

I convinced VGirl to get the vegetarian fried rice with me to share because I had read a review saying the fried rice was fantastic here. It's not a lie, I think we ate more than 3/4 of the plate before our mains had arrived. The vegetarian rice was full of tomato, broccoli, cucumber and kai lan pieces, the rice was fluffy and well separated, while it was also all coated in this deliciously savoury soy based sauce with a charry flavour. We polished off the plate, had a huddle, checked our wallets and decided to get a SECOND plate, which we finished almost as quickly.

Seasoned with what, liquid crack?

This was my main of the 2B chicken, pieces of crunchy chicken pieces tossed in a sweet and salty tamarind sauce, with minimal vegetables on the side. Okay, a minute amount of carrots, capsicum, onion and gai lan but I ate that up in like a second. The chicken pieces used are wonderfully moist and about 5cm long, they're very juicy and have a gloriously crunchy exterior. They're soaked in this intensely pungent tamarind, garlic and possibly fish sauce syrup that is really strong, but perfect with rice.

Sooo good

VGirl got the vegetarian red curry which was packed with lots of veggies, carrot, green beans, red capsicum, broccoli, bamboo sprouts and Thai holy basil. She loved the fragrance of it and said while she wasn't too sure what the difference between this and green curry, she liked it! 

2B Thai Restaurant
Atmosphere: 8, seems like a relaxed local location. I liked the relaxed nature of the place and how everyone just seemed to wander in.
Service: 7, quite good service. The waitress was easy to grab the attention of and very attentive of everyone's needs.
Food: 8, really good Thai food! I would happily go here again, the portions are decently sized, well priced and lots of bang for your buck in terms of ingredients present.

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.

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.