Charm Modern Thai

I have wanted to try Charm Modern Thai ever since it opened. In fact, we visited the restaurant a couple of times in hopes of a weekend lunch, but were disappointed both times because the restaurant was closed. The premise of Charm is that of "classic exotic Thai flavours with a slight Western modern influence".

However, we were in the neighbourhood for an evening movie and decided to try this place again for dinner. My experiences with Thai food in Vancouver have been mixed to say the least, and I've been trying to find one that would bring back memories of growing up in Thailand.

The interior of the restaurant is posh, plush, with red walls and booths, and gold accents. It's pretty refreshing to see a Thai restaurant that had a contemporary feel without the usual Thai kitsch. However, with the music and the darkness, it had a little too much of a 'nightclub' vibe.

We both ordered the Thai iced tea ($3). Though it was missing that characteristic bright orange hue, the tea was very good, with a nice balance of sweet and creamy, and a prominent tea taste.

The first dish we shared was Lemongrass Mussels ($10), which were steamed in a lemongrass, galangal, chili, Thai basil, lime and wine broth. It arrived in a large white bowl with a couple of slices of garlic toast. As soon as I tasted the broth, I was sold - the broth had a real punch with lime, herbs and chili, and was absolutely heavenly. It very much reflected the broths you would get in Thailand. The mussels, however, were on the tiny side; there was little meat inside and the morsels were far from plump.

For the other dishes, we decided to try out the classics, because what better way of testing out a Thai restaurant? We got the Papaya Salad ($10). Strangely, the server did not ask the level of heat we wanted for this dish. Anyway, it looked great when it arrived, piled high in a bowl, but like some other places, the salad was piled on top of a foundation of iceberg lettuce, giving the impression of a bigger portion than there actually is. I'm not a fan of this strategy.

The salad itself had good elements: the look of it, the texture of the papaya, the addition of carrots, the taste of fish sauce. However the dish was entirely too sweet.  A great som tam has to have a balance: the sweetness needs to offset the lime and chili, but this dish did not have that. This was disappointing because the salad looked so good.

Next was the Larb Organic Chicken ($10), which is a salad of minced chicken with spices, herbs, lime and fish sauce. Again, our spiciness preference was not asked.  This arrived with a side of iceberg, which is okay (but why iceberg?). The intention is to have the larb with the lettuce, almost like a lettuce wrap. This is because normally the larb would be really strong in spicing and flavour. Again, the elements were outwardly great, but this dish really lacked seasoning as well. I've never had a bland larb gai, but this was really watered down and nearly tasteless.

The Pad Thai ($12) was one of the dishes that I'd heard that Charm does really well, so we are excited to try it.  When it arrived, it certainly looked impressive, with the nest of carrots, and a few lonely stalks of chive. However, it looked a little off - there was no lime wedge, and normally you would have a larger side of chives to eat the noodles with. The noodles also looked really wet, which was not a great sign.

A good thing about the dish were the prawns, which were large and juicy. However, that was the end of the good stuff. Quite simply, the noodles were too soft, and were quite broken up; this is really bad. But the far larger sin was again in the flavours of the dish; the noodles were way too sweet. I mean overwhelmingly sugary. We couldn't even finish this dish. This is one reason a wedge of lime would have been a godsend here.

It's very possible that I'm being overly harsh here, but why would you ruin pad thai like this? This dish does not resemble anything you would get in Thailand. It just makes me shake my head.

After the disappointment of the dishes, we still decided to give dessert a chance; we shared the Thai tea ice cream ($4). Unlike the other dishes, this dessert had awful presentation. A scoop of ice cream in a glass bowl topped with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry? Really?

The taste of the ice cream was actually very good, with a great Thai tea flavour. Why don't we have this flavour in the stores? It would be a great addition to any gelato shop!  But we did have a major problem with this dessert, however; the ice cream tasted really old, and had icky, congealed lumps throughout, like the kind you'd get with ice cream that you'd left in your freezer quite some time ago.  Why would you serve this to your customer? It baffles the mind.

We were thoroughly let down with our dining experience. While the restaurant calls itself having modern Thai cuisine, they need to have much better classic dishes (or not have them at all on the menu). I just don't get it; do the compromise in flavours make for a better restaurant?

While it's true that I'm probably quite a lot tougher on Thai restaurants than other cuisines, it's because I seriously want these restaurants to be good, and I go into them with a great hope. It's tough to be let down so much. Disappointment is the word of the day on this one.

Go Thai

Living on the border of Burnaby/Coquitlam/New Westminster, we often embark on long walks in random directions. On one of these occasions, we started walking down North Road and found ourselves in the Sapperton neighbourhood in New Westminster. We passed by a Thai restaurant and decided to visit.

Go Thai is located on Columbia Street, right before you get into the core Sapperton strip. It's a little curious looking, because the location and the building is where you expect a fast food chain should be. However, we were curious about this place because apparently the owner is a woman from North East Thailand.

The restaurant is minimal and has very little ambiance, with unremarkable furniture and decor. However, I am always in some strange way charmed by places that are unapologetic about how it looks. It's kinda ballsy.

To our delight, the restaurant had a pretty decent Thai Iced tea ($2.50), being appropriately very sweet, orange and a distinctive tea taste. My only complaint is that it could have used a wee bit more evaporated milk. However, this was refreshing and a brilliant counter to the spicy food that was to follow.

I was very excited to see sticky rice on the menu, because up in Northern Thailand, this is a staple food, and you rarely see this in Thai restaurants for some reason. The portion is small ($3.00), but it's presented in a traditional rice basket. We ordered dishes that would normally be eaten with sticky rice in Thailand.

We ordered a variety of Thai staples, one of which is Som Tam ($8.95), or green papaya salad. This is a very standard dish in Thai restaurants, but few dishes do it well. This version was very good, with a nice balance of sweet, sour and salty. However, the salad was extremely spicy, even though we asked for 'medium' levels. It was so good that we couldn't help but finish the whole thing!

We also ordered the Larb Gai ($8.95), which is minced chicken served like a salad with onions, spices, cilantro, chili, and lime. This was really good and fresh tasting, though the dish had a touch too much sugar. However, the only thing I didn't like about both salad dishes is that they were served on a bed of iceberg lettuce, which made the dishes look a lot bigger than they were.

Next, we had the Gai Yang ($9.95), which is grilled chicken. In Thailand, people would grill a whole chicken over charcoal on the streets, and you can buy it in every street corner, cut up, and served with a sweet and sour chili sauce. This dish had echoes of that, but it was a pale comparison. The meat itself was chicken breast which was nicely seasoned, but slightly dry. There was a distinct grilled flavour, but not as intense as it should have been.

Finally, for dessert we had the deep fried bananas and ice cream ($4.95). The portions were very generous, and this dish was good, though not spectacular. The bananas were soggy rather than crispy, and the ice cream was just regular, plain vanilla ice cream.

All in all, we were happy to have discovered this hidden gem of a place, considering how reasonable the prices are. It's not just like in Thailand, but I'm not sure I'll ever find that place. However, we'd definitely be curious to try a lot more of their dishes.

Baan Thai Restaurant - Victoria

I was a little weary of trying a Thai restaurant in Victoria, but we passed by this place one night walking on Fort street and it seemed really popular. As you may or may not know, I'm particularly picky about Thai food because I was born and partially raised there, and because I've visited Thailand quite a few times and nothing is really comparable to the food you get in Thailand.

So we went in and we were pleasantly surprised at the interior because, aside from the window, there was a lack of Thai knick-knacks that almost always litter a Thai restaurant. Instead, the interior was warm, bright, and modern. However, what we weren't impressed by was that we had to stand there at the entrance, waiting for a table, without even a smile of acknowledgment, for five minutes. At this point we almost walked out because I was starting to get a hinkey feeling about the place.

The menu. There were the very usual items: curries, stir-fries, tom yam soups, fried noodles, and fried rice. There didn't seem to be anything to distinguish from any other Thai place at all. Also, there seemed to be lots of chicken dishes, and a distinct lack of pork/beef dishes for some reason.

The ordering of the food was a little strange. First, we wanted some Thai iced tea, but were informed that the machine was broken. Then beer from the tap--again, the tap was broken. I wanted to try their larb chicken, but they didn't have that. They also didn't have the gai yang (grilled chicken).

Okay.

At this point I was a little frustrated. However, the good thing is that our server (who actually seemed to be the owner as well), was actually Thai.

So we ended up with:

Chicken curry (around $12 bucks). This was okay. I mean, it wasn't bad, but it's hard to screw up a Thai curry, you know? There wasn't anything special about it---the taste was one note. Sometimes, with good Thai curries, you get this amazing depth of flavour, with kaffir lime leaf, lemongrass, etc., but this was just standard. It was still good to eat, mind you.

The second dish we got was the Pad Krapow Gai (around $12 bucks), or chicken with Holy Basil (a very different herb from regular basil, I assure you). I was really disappointed with this dish, because it seemed like just a regular stirfry. First of all, the pad krapow you get in Thailand is dry, with sharp holy basil flavour, but this one had lots and lots of sauce. Way too wet. There was only a mild vague basil flavour.

The experience was disappointing. Baan Thai is good if you're not picky and you're looking for standard Thai food. It seems to be very popular, in any case.

Lhy Thai

Inspired by a pretty good Thai dining experience at Maenam, I wanted to try some other Thai places that I'd heard about. One of these places was Lhy Thai, which is on Edmonds street in Burnaby, so when our friend Linda called us out for dinner, this was the place we chose. I was curious about the restaurant from Sherman's review of it, and from one of Shane's co-workers, who used to go there regularly when he worked close by.

We arrived on a dark and rainy weeknight, so there were plenty of seats. However, the restuarant did get a lot busier later in the night. The restaurant on the inside feels a little cramped, because there are a lot of tables crammed into the space, and the room was filled with a lot of Thai kitch, pictures and plants all over the place. However, there is nothing pretentious about this place, and the restaurant was definitely very comfortable.

Shane and Linda had a beer, but I opted for Thai iced tea, which was on the menu. It arrived in a small glass, but the taste of the tea was pretty similar to what you'd get in Thailand (it just needed to have a bit more punch). However, for $3.99, it was pricy for its size.

One of our appetizers we got was the spring roll ($5.95). These were large and crispy, with a tasty vegetarian filling. It came with a side of Chinese style sweet and sour sauce, which I didn't care for. I would have preferred that the spring rolls came with the traditional Thai nam jiim (fish sauce, lime, garlic, fresh chilies, cilantro).

Next, we ordered the pork satay ($5.95), which came with a side of pickled cucumbers and a peanut sauce. The satays were pretty good, though not exceptional. The pork had a nice grilled flavour and the peanut sauce was finger licking and very tasty. The cucumbers were refreshing, and cut the richness of the sauce nicely.

I wanted to get the chicken larb ($8.25) as a kind of test, since it's definitely not a common thing for people to order in Thai restaurants, and because when it's good, it's really, really good. One of the best memories from a trip to Thailand was ordering this dish in Northeast Issan province from a street vendor and eating it with sticky rice. When it's good, the larb is pungent with garlic and lime, fresh with herbs, tongue-numbingly spicy, and instantly addictive. So how did this larb from Lhy Thai hold up? It was surprisingly good. Of course it didn't have that level of spice and the sourness of the dish was tampered a bit by the addition of sugar, but overall, it compared relatively well. The best thing I can say about it is that I would order it again. It was great with rice.

Next came the green curry with chicken ($8.50). The curry was a little watery, but had excellent flavour (it's not too good when the curry is too thick with coconut milk either); there was a nice complexity to the curry, which was really good. The contents of the curry, bamboo, peppers, chicken, were pretty standard. This went really great with rice.

We also tried the pad thai with shrimp ($8.50). If you've ever eaten pad thai in Thailand (off the main 'tourist' drag, of course), you'll know that what passes for pad thai in Canada is not really authentic. It shouldn't be red and sweet, for instance, and should always be served with a wedge of lime and a handful of chives. So this pad thai was just ok. It was red and sweet, but not overly so. It also had way too much ground peanut (peanuts should just give a small textural contrast and a bit of flavour and shouldn't dominate). Hey, it tasted good, you know? But pad thai-wise, it was a bit of a disappointment.

We were really full, but how could we say no to dessert? So we ordered each dessert they offered: Mango with sticky rice, coconut ice cream with coconut meat, and deep fried bananas with mango ice cream. Yum, yum, yum. Linda loved the banana dessert and declared the mango ice cream a really good match to the deep fried banana. How can you go wrong with deep fried banana?

The mango with sticky rice was good, though with a few small flaws: the mango was the Mexican variety and was not too ripe, so it didn't have that ripe mango aroma and sweetness which is so essential to the dessert. However, the sticky rice with coconut milk was good, although the coconut was missing the pinch of salt that gives the dessert such a strange and amazing out of this world quality.

The best dessert of the night, surprisingly, was the coconut ice cream with coconut meat. The ice cream was delicious, and the coconut meat was an unusual addition (though it makes sense, of course!). It was simple and delicious.

We love Lhy Thai. It's not the most authentic Thai place, but it's authentic enough to bring really good memories of Thailand. The Thai couple who run it are really kind (they even gave us calendars at the end of the meal!). The prices are also a bit of a throwback (the dishes are mostly around $8, surprisingly enough). I'd be happy to return to try other dishes, for sure.

Maenam

After looking at stuffed dead animals at the Vancouver Museum, we walked a few blocks up to 4^th Avenue. Maenam has been on our radar for a little while, ever since it opened with a rave review from the Georgia Straight. I was excited to try authentic Thai flavours, as the Vancouver scene is a little lacking in stellar Thai restaurants. As I’ve mentioned before, I was born in Thailand and grew up there before immigrating to Canada when I was a child. Our family never went to Thai restaurants when I was growing up, because the food was so bad. But from my mom’s cooking and a couple of long trips back to Thailand as an adult, I declare Thai food to be my favourite cuisine ever. Like you know how sometimes someone asks you if you could choose only one type of cuisine to eat for the rest of your life? Well, for me it’d be Thai food, hands down. There is a freshness, flavour and depth to Thai food which I’ve never found anywhere else. And for me it was only in Thailand that you can get that kind of flavour (ok, there was this restaurant in San Francisco....). So we went to Maenam hoping, hoping this would be IT.

Maenam is right in the heart of Kitsilano on 4^th avenue, between the tree streets Cypress and Maple. The restaurant inside is modern and clutter-free, with sage green walls, grass wall feature, and warm wood floors. There is a row of banquette seating along one mirrored wall, and a few tables near the window and in the middle of the room; there are seats for about 35 people, upon estimation. One thing that struck me was the restaurant’s beautifully shiny cork tables, which had a really beautiful organic swirly pattern.

We arrived as soon as they opened, and were the only customers for a while (it was also one of those horribly rainy and wet Saturdays).

We asked if the restaurant had Thai iced tea (a deliciously sweet and bright orange concoction of strong tea, evaporated milk and sugar that’s sold everywhere in Thailand), but they didn’t, so we just settled for water and a regular tea. The lunch/late night menu is small, with small plates at $8, and larger plates $12-14 . We decided to share a few plates.

This is the green papaya salad or som dtam ($8), and I was really excited when this arrived. It looked fabulous, with crunchy shreds of green papaya, carrot, pieces of long bean, tomatoes, all topped with peanuts and dried shrimp. It looked like the real thing. However, tasting it was a disappointment, because the salad was so mild. It was overly sweet, and normally with a good som dtam you'd get really pungent, strong, assertive lime, fish sauce, chili, and garlic flavours--like every bite would knock you out. This was so diluted, so pale, so lacking...it felt definitely like the dish was 'dumbed down'.

Next we shared the Fried Rice with Sausage ($12), which came generously piled on a large plate. I was excited and amazed at this dish. The Thai sausage (Naam) that is featured here is amazing, and so incredibly true to the what they have in Thailand. In Thailand, Naam is really popular, and it is basically a seasoned pork that is left to ferment until it acquires a pleasing sour flavour. This sausage is a little unusual in that it is very dense and dry in texture, so I imagine this might need some getting used to. But for me, it was so familiar and so good. It went with the fried rice really well, which was seasoned with a slightly sweet soy based sauce. Also served with the fried rice, as is the custom in Thailand, is the nahm jim dipping sauce, which is basically lime, fish sauce, garlic and fresh chili. The nahm jim is wonderful, sour, salty and strong, exactly like what you'd find in Thailand.

We also shared the Muslim Oxtail Soup ($14). This soup was pretty good, with a nice warm heat to it from the dried chili. The pieces of beef from the Oxtail were delicious and tender. It was good with a scoop or two of white rice. Athough it was a good dish, I would have prefered the flavours to be a little stronger. However, this was enjoyable and perfect on a rainy day.

The fried rice and the soup were both enormous, so we were both really full. But we couldn't resist sampling a dessert. We decided on rice donuts with Thai iced tea ice cream ($7), which sounded the most interesting. The donuts were soft and fluffy, but unfortunately, the thick coating of sugar obscured any flavour the rice flour would have given to the donut. It tasted like your usual donut, except a little softer in texture. However, the standout was the ice cream, which tasted exactly like the Thai iced tea you'd get back on the streets of Thailand. Even though it arrived either not frozen enough or partially melted, the taste was amazing. It had a spectacular Thai iced tea (Cha Yen) flavour. Yum, yum, yum!

So in the end it was an experience filled with really high highs and low lows. I'm looking forward to the future of this restaurant though, because if they can bring in more authentic Thai dishes instead of the usual fare (or at least do the usual stuff really, really well), this place would have a spectacular future to be at the forefront of the Thai restaurant scene.

We would definitely come back here, no question, to see what else they have on the menu.