Michele, our lovely vegetarian friend, is visiting from LA for the week. After racking our brains to find somewhere that will satisfy her veggie needs and our omnivorous pigginess, we settled on Wondee Siam in Hells Kitchen. Yay! I heart Thai food.
I can conclude this post now because this place had me at BYOB. But nah, I'll continue on and use my feeble memory to recall our procession of food items. First up, a shredded pork salad special that was more lettuce wrap than salad, although I use the term "lettuce" loosely since it's pretty apparent to anyone with eyeballs that the dark green collard green twin was not lettuce, but a um, collard green twin. Sorry, I have no idea what the vegetation is. I expected fibers and aching jaws from chewing the greens, but it was surprisingly tender and had a nice deep flavor. Veggie flavor, that is. The shredded pork was awesome. Very ginger-y and lime-y. The lime-ness came from diced whole lime, skin and all. Brilliant. I love the peanuts and onions too. Both provided mucho flavor and great texture.
Then we had more apps, in the form of taro spring rolls and scallion pancake. The spring rolls were fine, just like any other spring roll I've had at Thai places. Not too much to discuss there. The scallion pancakes were bleh and totally not what we expected... I mean, when you hear pancake, don't you imagine a large flat round thing? Instead, we got hockey puck shaped fried things with scallion inside. The outside was too doughy, so the whole thing just tasted fried. No matter, the rest of the food to come was awesome.
One of my fav dishes of the night was the catfish salad. The catfish was some how fried into a fluffy crisp. You ask, how can fish be fluffy?! I dunno! Ask the chefs! But it was fluffy, so very fried and fluffy. On top of the fluff, you got the normal papaya salad stuff - green papaya, cilantro, peanuts, onions, and lots of lime juice and spiciness. Yum. I love how the papaya salad offset the heaviness of fried fish (even though it was fluffy). I couldn't stop eating this.
The crispy duck was yummy as well. The duck was dusted in some sort of light coating and fried to a crisp. Super duper crisp. That was some crispy duck, they weren't kidding. I loved it. Spicy and crispy and ducky, what was there not to like?
The avocado curry confused me. As in, I didn't get what the avocado is for. It was a typical and delicious Thai curry with coconut milk (my fav!)... and then they throw in a chunk of avocado. Huh? Why didn't they blend it with the curry? That would be so interesting and yum. I could have just brought a whole avocado, throw it into the bowl, and replicated this dish. It was good, but not what I wanted from ""avocado curry".
Our other meat dish was minced chicken with basil (or something). I'm a huge fan of anything Thai + minced chicken. Oh man, do Thai people know how to mince that chicken. It was moist, spicy, and so good with rice. Ahhh... rice - I love how they served the rice. In ball shape, that is. Rice balls! Rock!
Can't go to a Thai place without getting some sort of noodles. Pad thai, veggie style, was our choice. It was really good. I especially love all that fried tofu. and peanuts. and rice noodles. and scallions. aw man, pad thai is the perfect dish. I can eat it forever and ever and ever.
I really liked Wondee Siam. The place was tiny and the pacing of the food was all bizarre (apps came really fast and then we waited and waited and waited for entrees). But it is BYOB and the food was delicious. Delicious food + cheap booze = keeper
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