Thai Viet

I know I've been eating out a lot lately but I can't help it. I'm tired at the end of the day and this is a great city to go out and eat food! Tonight we chose our location based on close proximity and went to a Thai and Vietnamese restaurant appropriately called Thai Viet. The restaurant had a very generic and plain exterior, which was quite misleading because it had a very cozy interior. The table next to us were talking about how it was one of the neighborhoods hidden treasures as we sat down, so I figured we were in for a treat.

I ordered a dinner for one type meal, complete with soup, salad, entree, dessert and coffee. I always get confused here because entree actually means appetizer. In this case, entree means an entree. Anyhow, that's the least of my French/English confusion and really irrelevant to the food at hand. My appetizers were top notch. I really enjoyed the asparagus crab soup, though aside from being told that asparagus was in it, I wouldn't be able to tell you so. It was sort of a miso flavored broth with crab basically. The Thai chicken salad was surprisingly good, probably my favorite of the things I was served, with a very well balanced Thai dressing and a generous portion of chicken for an appetizer salad.

I chose the "1000 spice shrimp" as my entree over the grilled flank steak (there were other options, but these were the most appealing) more or less because I was curious as to how many spices they REALLY used. I think I counted 16, which is more than the Colonel Sanders secret recipe! However, that is only if you include things like salt, chilies and garlic as "spices". What do you mean you can't make out anything resembling shrimp from my wonderful photograph?

The dessert was fried bananas, which was a real sour note as the end of the meal. Basically, mushy bananas in a sort of tempura (but not quite that light) batter that were deep fried, but noticeably so in fryers that hadn't been cleaned in a while and therefore ended up tasting somewhat of fish, chicken and whatever else may have entered the fryer that night. Other than that, for the price I paid (under for both Shannon and my dinners) I was quite satisfied.