Writing Club - The Thai Place

TheThai Place


Where’s the last place you ate out? Was coconut milk on the menu? Probably not. At least I’ve never noticed coconut milk on the menus of King’s, Eat ‘n Park, or Ponderosa – the “usual” places for family “out-to-dinner” nights. But coconut milk is evidently in lots of Thai dishes I discovered when my parents included me in the dinner arrangements for my mother’s birthday. The Thai Place is on Freeport Road right across from Waterworks Mall. That in itself is a major plus for anyone who likes to shop Old Navy, Barnes n’ Noble, or even WalMart.

Thai food may not be something with which many people are familiar. Maybe that’s why there were only a few people in the restaurant which would accommodate about 60 people. I don’t like crowded restaurants so that suited me well. I enjoyed the background music there much more than the “background noise” you hear in other more popular establishments.. What I really liked were the tablesettings with those gold folded napkins sitting up like little crowns and the mirrored walls that made the room seem double its size. Really the seating was just plastic booths, but it was comfortable.

Deciding what to order did take us a while. After all the menu was 6 pages long and included all kinds of dishes I’d never heard of. I’d expected the menu to basically be the same as at a Chinese restaurant. Not so. There was a Thai version of General Tso’s chicken and some sweet n’ sour dishes, but the other selections were all Thai. I’m not that adventuresome, so I actually just ordered Sweet n’ Sour chicken. My parents were not as inhibited. My mom started with Tom kah soup which was made with a coconut milk base and had chicken and fresh mushrooms in it and then chose an entrée called Tiger Prawns that was basically some large shrimp and mixed vegetables in coconut milk again. My dad had some kind of dish in which the main ingredient was squid. One neat thing is that the waitress asks you how hot (spicy) you want your food and you get to choose a number from 1 to 10. My dad discovered he didn’t like things quite as hot as he thought. He’d said 8 to the waitress! He did finish all his food (plus some of mine!) but he’d broken out in a sweat by the time he finished. Both my parents raved about their food.