Talay Thai

This past weekend, while visiting my parents, we checked out a Thai restaurant called Talay Thai. Although it's been around for awhile, it was our first time there. Usually at a new Thai place we will try some standbys to gauge how the restaurant is, and also some new dishes.

We started out with the chicken and potato curry puffs and the jeeb thai dumplings (shrimp and chicken), two of our usual orders:

(Sorry for the poor quality of the photos - low light, no flash, iPhone)
They were pretty good. The curry puffs were light and flaky with a good curry flavor. We have had curry puffs from a lot of places, so I wouldn't rank them #1, but they were good. Same for the dumplings. They were good, but probably not the top of my ranking list. Then again, I order even more kanom jeeb than I do curry puffs, so it's a tough list.

Next we ordered something that we don't usually get at other places - a crispy herb calamari with a sweet chili sauce.


It was your standard fried calamari (with a little more flavor in the batter) and a good sauce. And we like fried calamari. So the verdict was that the appetizers were pretty good. Now to see how the entrees stacked up.

First, we got something called "Talay Suki" which we haven't had before.


It consisted of steamed chicken, beef, shrimp and calamari with egg noodles and vegetables. The menu said it came with herbal chili sauce on the side but the sauce tasted to me like the sweet soy sauce you get with kanom jeeb (like I said, a bit addicted to kanom jeeb). This was good. It tasted really healthy, everything was cooked well and wasn't dry or chewy, and the flavor was refreshing.

Second, we got one of our standbys - basil fried rice. Our first thought was, where's the basil? Usually when we get basil fried rice, there is a lot of basil in it and it's visible from the start.


We almost asked about it but then we found some basil near the bottom, enough for everyone to get 1 or 2 small pieces. The fried rice was pretty good, but for basil fried rice, I would have preferred more basil. Not just because it looked monochromatic, but because I really love basil. Maybe they were running out?

Third, we tried one of the curries. In this case it was yellow curry chicken (without peppers due to a food allergy).


This was very flavorful. I'm not sure why some Thai restaurants don't have yellow curry. It's one of my favorites. I love the potatoes that soak up the curry and the onions and carrots here were well stewed in the curry as well.

The last entree we tried was the pad thai.


This was pretty solid as well. I don't have anything extra special to say about it - it was good but nothing earth-shattering. But at least it was a good dish.

For dessert, I was excited to see mango sticky rice on the menu, one of my favorite things to order at a Thai restaurant. I love sweet sticky rice.


I don't think it's really mango season so the mango was a little on the hard side, but the sticky rice was delicious. One of my favorite things. I could take or leave the coconut syrup since I just think sticky rice is that good on its own.

We liked our meal at Talay Thai and would return. I'm not sure how many Thai restaurants there are in Staten Island but this is the first one we tried (and it was also recommended by word of mouth). Now that we've tried our standbys, next time maybe we'll be able to report back on some more new things!