Thai Chili, Chinatown

Life in the big city means that you should have each of these four things: neighborhood Italian, neighborhood pizza, neighborhood Chinese, and neighborhood Thai.

Our neighborhood Italian is DIK, and we have a neighborhood Chinese that’s delivery – if we want sit-down, we have a favorite in Chinatown, so I guess we have two neighborhood Chinese restaurants. Neighborhood pizza is Domino’s, and while I know this isn’t so desirable, remember that this is NOT NYC and we don’t have a nightlife here. Other neighborhoods do, but we don’t and when you have a cold, there’s nothing so wonderful as some airborne and a hot pizza waiting right outside your back door.

As far as neighborhood Thai goes, we think we’ve found it in a little place called Thai Chili.

Thai Chili’s misfortune lies in its location. It’s in the shopping-mall like underbelly of the Chinatown Regal Cinemas. What DOES work for TC though, is that it is owned by the Sushi-Go-Round right next door, so you have the benefit of getting your pad thai and a spicy tuna hand roll brought over from next door. That’s kinda cool; not that we’ve made use of that yet, though. Also, they do get a huge number of people that come for dinner-and-a-movie and then there are those that find they are peckish on the way out of the latest mass-market flick.

Don’t be fooled though; I can’t even count on my hands all the good pan-asian fare to come out of strip mall settings. Being in a movie theater mall is like stripmallplus.

TC is turning into our default Sunday night asian joint, since Sushi Taro is closed on Sundays. Thai Chili is virtually abandoned, and it’s kinda nice to be able to talk and enjoy the burn and maybe play a few rounds of mushroom-or-olive. This is because during the uptimes, TC broadcasts pre-recorded concerts on a couple of large screens in the restaurant. Beyonce was nice, JLo was ok, but Shania was downright eyeball-stabbing. This is really my only complaint with TC. Their food isn’t as good as South Florida, but it’s still good, and they do a definitively above average Tom Kha.

If you’re in the mood for cellophane noodles, Pad Woon Sen is rather tasty. Monkey usually gets a panang or a red curry. Their pad thai is pretty good – it comes in an omelette envelope, but it’s served warm, so it doesn’t really develop flavor until the day after when it comes out of the fridge nice and cold and then gets nuked until it’s lukewarm. My favorite though, is the green curry fried rice. It’s fried with green chilies, so I always have to pick them out so I won’t bite down on them, but I definitely like the extra spice that they add.

Also, thai iced tea is excellent. It’s $2.74 and I don’t think it includes refills, but I really, really don’t foresee that preventing me from continuing to order it.

And speaking of, I could so go for a thai tea right now.