Pa Thai

i was part of the demolition team that decimated a whole lechon in under thirty minutes earlier in the day. on the other hand, that wasn't an excuse not to grab dinner after attending mass.

luk thai was convenient, i already had the chance to sample their (not so stellar) food offering but was pretty impressed with the tom yam soup so we decided to give it another shot.

aside from the tom yam, ron ordered "khao gaeng kheawan gai" which literally translates to amazing-thai-chicken-in-green-curry-rice-topping. which is pretty long winded. true to it's name, the dish was amazing. amazingly bland. even the carinderia curry served more flavor than this version. it was salty, flat, lacked the "gingery" taste and had sweet potatoes instead of plain caucasian patatas.

my order wasn't any better. i got the "lad na nua" which is supposed to mean flat noodles in thick gravy sauce with beef. right. they are indeed a race of few words.


from a taste perspective, imagine ordinary siopao sauce (not the cebuano tomato ketchup or hot sauce version) but the original sweet, soy sauce rich, garlic infused and cornstarch thickened variety on top of flat rice noodles mixed with petchay, bell peppers and tough beef bits. tasty? hardly. unless your idea of a fun meal is to chew on rubber bits.

is there any saving grace to the meal? yes. the tom yam tasted superb.

red, red, the color of hot hot spicy goodness.

some of the spicy ingredients of the tom yam soup.

personally it's kind of difficult to be blunt about the experience as the owner is someone i know in a kevin bacon sort of three degrees of separation thing. he's the dance instructor of a friend of mine. but since i have no desire to join dancing with the stars he can cha cha his way out of my recommended list.

he ambushed us on our way out and asked if we enjoyed the meal. all i could muster was "the interiors are nice."

on the side, here's an interesting anecdote: the name of the place is Luk Thai, on the other hand, the logo has this curved minaret symbol just before the sign and it looks curiously like a capital "O". If you're bisaya, then you know that it now reads OLuk Thai. If you're interested to know what that means, post a comment.

p.s. i was originally planning to release this post 8/22 sunday but got caught up with a lot of work. :)