I always figure a good measure of Thai place is their pad thai. Like omelette and miso soup at a sushi place, or pierogies at a Polish place, or…pepperoni and cheese at a pizza place, I guess; it’s a dish that you just have to do well if you want respect.
My favourite Toronto food critic often reserves a place in a Thai review for a quip about the general lack or abundance of ketchup in the pad thai sauce, and I’ve taken that to heart. I always want to know how much MSG there is (there also shouldn’t be any ketchup or MSG involved, and there isn’t any at Talay Thai!!). What there should be in Pad Thai is tamarind, lime, fish sauce, palm sugar, and a little or a lot of fresh red chilies. Hot, sour, salty, sweet, pungent (aka “umami” or “earthy” from the fish sauce. Shrimp paste and soy sauce also give this effect. Generally “things fermented” do the trick).
But here the owner steered me away from the Pad Thai to the other popular rice noodle dish, Pad Kee Mao. I’m willing to overlook a poor pad thai, especially when the owner points you to something else, but that something else should be better (I’ll still go to Thai Bangkok in the Faubourg for MSG headache-causing Pad Thai sometimes, masochist that I am). I’m not a Pad Kee Mao expert, but I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be more interesting than “sort of salty, oily noodles with fake crab, rubber shrimp, soft but bland squid tubes, and not enough basil.” “Authentic” Pad Thai-lovers complain that it isn’t supposed to be a mind-blowingly flavourful dish when served street-style (dry), so I’m willing to wager that Pad Kee Mao isn’t always revolutionary either, but the highlights of this dish were the portion size (it’s enormous) and the crisp vegetables (which are great – but you don’t buy pad thai for the optional cucumber garnish).
So you usually buy the Pad Thai (or Pad Kee Mao) because someone in your dinner party figures it’s the thing to do. Well your job has now become to inform that person that it would be a better idea to spend your $9.95 on a vermicelli salad roll with chicken (Po Pia Sot – $3.75 each) and 4 of the vegetarian egg rolls ($5.95) the staff were rolling by hand on a table in the front when I entered.
Or put the money toward the Panang curry, which was enough to make me want to invest in a plane ticket to Thailand…or an annual metro pass to get to Cote-des-Neiges on a regular basis. Though I’d probably want to bike it to burn off the creamy coconut milk blended with roasted peanuts, a small dose of chilies, chunks of chicken, and red and green bell peppers. It’s curry for wimps, though, so ask for some extra fresh chilies to bite if you like it hot.
The table d’hote menus are a steal, but not if you can’t get the Kai Himmaparn – chicken with fresh orange slices and roasted cashews – $12.95à la carte. It’s kind of like sweet and sour chicken because of the sweetness and tiniest bit of acidity from the orange, but then the whole roasted cashews turn the juice into nutty cream sauce as you chew and they fall apart. At first I didn’t think it was too sweet, but after trying the Pad Makheur eggplant with basil and pepper and going back to it, it turned cloying.
It was the dish I was most craving for leftovers on day two, even though I could see all the fat globules of the sauce clinging to the meat and deliciously bitter green peppers. I even saved the sauce (and the peanut sauce) to slightly dilute and simmer fresh leafy greens in on day 3, after I’d eaten all the chicken. Broccoli and green beans wouldn’t have worked, but leafy greens soaked everything up. Waste is a horrible thing.
That eggplant I mentioned – Pad Makheur ($11.95) wasn’t the best eggplant I’ve ever eaten. The texture was perfect, the small Asian eggplants mushy and tender. Eggplant is a sponge for oil, though, so I asked how oily the dish was going to be before ordering. “Not too oily,” was the response, which sounded good enough to me. And it wasn’t that oily, relative to most places. Still, be careful how much of this dish you inhale. It sadly wasn’t too hard, though, since the soy-based sauce didn’t have any MSG (hurray! but no flavour replaced it). It could have used a little heat, and the almost raw green bell pepper chunks were bitter, especially with the basil and after having eaten the orange-sauced chicken. But sweetness needs something to contrast it, and this did the trick. Besides, I hear vegetables are important.
For dessert, the perfect 5-ingredient combination of sticky rice, coconut milk, salt, sugar, and fresh mango, or deep-fried apple topped with honey (both $3.95).
What: Talay Thai
Where: 5697 Cote-des-Neiges (at Cote-Ste-Catherine)
How much: $12 for lunch specials catering to the nearby Jewish hospital crowd. $9.50 for an entire meal of green papaya salad (mostly just the unripe fruit – don’t expect a cornucopia of colours and flavours) that doesn’t seem as bad a deal as at dinner when $35 stuffs two people.
Why: Orange-cashew and coconut-peanut sauces. The food isn’t made with low-quality ingredients – though the meat is far from organic and I do skip the non-sustainable farmed shrimp. There are lots of vegetarian options, from simple stir-fried veggies in oyster sauce to my favourite orange-cashew sweet-and-sour sauce over tofu.
514-739-2999
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