Chai Thai

Over the years that we've lived in Hell's Kitchen, we have been to Chai Thai (55th & 8th) a number of times, especially after long walks through Central Park.  We haven't been there in about a year, but found ourselves in the area yesterday and decided to check it out.

The menu had quite a few new additions since our last visit.  We decided to put together a menu of mostly small plates, focusing on the new part of the menu.

The first dish to come was the "homemade Thai dim sum" aka steamed chicken, shrimp and water chestnut dumplings aka kanom jeeb (4 pieces, $6).  We get kanom jeeb at a lot of different Thai restaurants because we really like steamed dumplings.  It's also a good way to compare restaurants.

Each dumpling was topped with bits of peppers, green onions and fried garlic.  It also came with a sweet soy sauce on the side.  They were pretty good, but probably not the best kanom jeeb we've had.  Even though they were supposed to have water chestnuts, they were only slightly present (in my opinion) or barely there at all (in A's opinion).  The flavor of the meatball inside the wrapper was good, and the wrapper was thin, which was nice.  Even without the water chestnuts, it was a pretty good appetizer.

We tried to order the garlic chive cake (another new item we hadn't tried) but they were out of that.  So we ended up getting curry puffs instead (2 puffs, $5).

The curry puffs had a good curry flavor but the insides were different from what we were expecting.  Instead of a smooth paste-like curry mixture, there were individual seasoned pieces of chicken with vegetables (corn, string beans, etc).  It was good, but there's something about those soft, squishy, gooey curry puffs that are really tasty that was missing here.  The relish appeared to be the usual onion and cucumber relish, but it was sweeter than some others, which was a little odd for us.

The third dish to arrive was our salad - minced chicken, shrimp and cellophane noodles (aka yum woon sen) ($8).

This was exactly what we thought it would be - a bed of lettuce, topped with grilled shrimp (2 pieces), minced chicken, tomatoes, red peppers, red onions, cellophane noodles, green onions in a dressing of lime juice, fish sauce and herbs.  It was tasty and light and very flavorful.

We also got one noodle dish - chicken pad thai with cellophane noodles ($12).  We've had a similar dish before at Qi (the special pad thai made with cellophane noodles and seafood in an egg white crepe).

It was good but we prefer the one at Qi because that one is really unique and this one was a little more salty.  This one was basically a good pad thai made with different noodles.  Good pad thai makes us happy!

It was a good dinner at Chai and it was nice to try something different from the lychee fried rice or the grilled chicken we usually get.  Maybe next time they will have the garlic chive cake!