Pad Thai from Joy Yee's Noodles - $8.50

1163 East Ogden Avenue, Naperville, IL - 630.579.6800

Pad Thai is a dish of stir-fried rice noodles with eggs, fish sauce, tamarind juice, red chilli pepper, plus any combination of bean sprouts, shrimp, chicken, or tofu, garnished with crushed peanuts and coriander. It is normally served with a piece of lime, the juice of which can be added along with Thai condiments.
- Excerpt from wikipedia

I did a post on this same dish before here and now I'm showing you another restaurant's take on it. Joy Yee's Noodles is a fairly prestigious shop in Chinatown of Chicago, but this is one of their newer shops in the suburbs. Also, I believe they are more famously known for their bubble tea instead of their food.

Anyway, I have reached the conclusion that just about every dish at Joy Yee's is good, but not great, but they make up for their lack of awesomeness by giving you huge portions. That's definitely okay with me. Another handy feature is their ginormous menu with pictures of nearly every dish.

But that's beside the point. Today, I'm criticizing their pad thai and like I stated about the rest of their food, it's good, but not great. If you're only looking to leave stuffed to the brim with some decent quality food at a fair price, then this place is for you. But if you're seeking something to tantalize your tastebuds, then I recommend driving a few miles from there to Lao Sze Chuan (which I'll post about later).

Beef Pad See Ew from Ping Pong - $9.00

3322 North Broadway Street, Chicago, IL - (773)281-7575

Rice noodles are the friggin' bomb diggity, especially the fat ones. Drool.

If you've never had rice noodles, they're a more tender, doughy noodle than the standard spaghetti noodle. Anyway, these Thai noodles were mixed with broccoli, carrots, onions, and crush peanuts. Although the dish is pretty awesome, I couldn't detect anything unique about this particular recipe. Translation: if you find pad see ew somewhere else for cheaper, then go with that one.

Ping Pong gives you the option to substitute shrimp instead for $3 more, but those would have to be some monstrous shrimp to be worth $3 more.

Gang Ped Yang (Duck Curry) from Tasty Thai - $11.95

287 Christiana Road, New Castle, DE - (302)322-1306

The duck curry is described on the menu as "boneless roasted duck, tomato, and pineapples in chef's special red curry."

This is another great selection from a mediocre Thai restaurant. The dish is supposed to be spicy, but it's not so much the burns-my-tongue kind of spicy. It's more like the tickles-my-throat-and-makes-me-want-to-cough spicy. As with all curry dishes that I know of, this comes with a little cardboard box of white rice to mix with the curry.

The angle of the picture doesn't show the size, but it comes in one of those one quart plastic tubs that most Chinese restaurants tend to use, but they probably only fill it up about 75% total. The price is a bit high in my opinion, but then I justify it by reminding myself that Thai food is more of a novelty in these parts.

Crispy Honey Roasted Duck from Tasty Thai - $11.95

287 Christiana Road, New Castle, DE - (302)322-1306

This is deep-fried boneless duck tossed in the "chef's special three flavor sauce topped with crispy basil leaves."

Although it may look spicy, it's actually a very sweet dish, and although the name says otherwise, the breading is more soggy than crispy. But even with these "setbacks" the dish holds a good flavor and I revisit this meal often.

Mien Kam

Ingredients.

While the name bears strong similarity to Adolf Hitler's book (just a character flip and 2 letters short), this here is not a German dish. It's a Thai appetizer.



The ingredients, clockwise from the top, spiraling into the center, are: dried shrimp, mint leaves, diced lime, cili padi (a very very spicy chili), chopped lemongrass, diced onion, toasted dried coconut and finally, roasted peanuts. The 2 missing ingredients from the photo is the sauce and the leaves that you use to wrap all this with, both of which I do not know the name.

Before the fold.

What you do is grab one of the heart-shaped leaves, fold it into a cone (if you cannot imagine how then you suck at origami) and drop a bit of each of these ingredients in, along with a dollop of the unknown sauce. For the purpose of this shot I did not roll the leaf into a cone (this is now sounding like a drug blog), but what happens after that is you just roll the cone up and eat it whole.

Apparently the original dish does not include mint leaves. That's something my mom added in, and it works well too, considering that this is a very raw and uhm... "sharp" tasting appetizer. It's difficult to explain the taste, it's a combination of... zesty, sour, sweet, nutty and very green. You try finding one word to sum all that up.

Thai Foon, Darling Harbour - $?

Shop 329-330 Level 2, Harbourside Shopping Centre, Darling Drive, Darling Harbour, Sydney NSW 2000

This was dinner with workmates nearly a month ago in Sydney. One of them was a vegetarian so a lot of these dishes were vegetarian friendly (not specifically vegetarian but they didn't contain ingredients that would've harmed my friend's consciousness, at the cost of my meat loving appetite). We came here 3 times in a week because we were too indecisive and lazy to look elsewhere that catered for tree hugging vegetarian hippies. Also, I don't think most of what we ordered were Thai dishes.

Vegetable Tempura

Vegetable tempura. This technically isn't a thai dish, of course. It wasn't too bad, altho I was hoping for brown or button mushrooms to be in the mix. It also isn't the regular tempura dough, so I guess that gave it that little bit of difference from being a complete ripoff.

Tofu in Satay Sauce

I'm not sure if this is Thai too. Grilled tofu maybe, and the sauce is actually a peanut-ish cream-ish sauce from the Malaysian dish Satay (barbequed meat sticks, like kebab). If it is, do correct me. But I don't like tofu so I only ate the vegetables.

Grilled Tofu

Grilled Tofu with some kinda sauce, I don't remember this very well, to be honest I didn't touch this dish, like I said I'm not a big fan of tofu. I can only tell you that it looks spicy, but I suppose you can see that for yourself.

Steamed Fish

We're now starting to move out of hippie territory, as there are some vegetarians who eat fish. This wasn't too bad, pretty common, reminds me a lot of chinese steamed fish with assam. In fact come to think of it there are probably a lot of dishes from South East Asia that's available from more than 1 country, with slight tweaks to separate one from the other.

Beef Curry

Ahh meat! This was not bad, but I'm not sure if it was all the vegetables that made this dish extra good. The curry was not too spicy and very flavourful, which is how I like my curry. Again, I can't tell if this is Thai, not to my knowledge, but I can't confirm.

Mixed Grill

And finally, the best dish of the night, the mixed grill of meat and seafood. I think this dish wouldn't stand out so well if all the other dishes weren't made of leaf. I mean don't get me wrong, I love my greens as much as the next person, but when you have 5 mediocre vegetable dishes and a plate of grilled meat? Not a tough decision.

Overall, it wasn't a very memorable meal but we were starving, and it's not like we hate vegetables or anything, so that's probably why we went back there 3 times and didn't really complain much. Either we weren't looking hard enough, or it's just plain hard to find vegetarian food in Sydney.

Now these shots are pretty crappy as the colour sucks (and I've gimp-ed most of them to fix the colour as best I can) and some of them are out of focus but it was the best I could do in the poor lighting conditions, we sat outside where there were distant spot lights and neon signs as a light source. Oh well.

Pad Thai from Tasty Thai - $8.95

287 Christiana Road, New Castle, DE - (302)322-1306

Here is yet another mediocre dish in my neighborhood. As far as I know, Tasty Thai is the only Thai restaurant within a 30 minute radius and the next closest place charges about double this for a smaller serving size. So when I need to have my Thai food fix, this is it right here.

Every trip is an adventure because their chefs are pretty inconsistent. Some dishes are GODAWFUL while others are fairly tasty. Thankfully, the pad thai dish is one of the more respectable ones I've tried, even if it does come in an orange hue.

WARNING: One of the "GODAWFUL" dishes I speak of is the Lad Na - a dish I absolutely ADORE from other restaurants, but this place has a version that makes me want to curl up in fetal position and cry.