Long Charm Thai

I have been trying to eat lunch at home most days, but today we were out of sandwich meat, I was not in the mood for tuna or microwaved pizza again, and after an overload of beet greens last night, I could not imagine having them two meals in a row. The solution? A cheap Thai lunch special. After all, I can't easily make that at home.

I decided to order from Long Charm Thai, a (sort of) new Thai restaurant in Hell's Kitchen. I say that it's "sort of"new because Long Charm itself is new, but there has been a Thai restaurant in that space since before we moved to the neighborhood years ago. It started out as Tiny Thai (which we went to), then became Tai & Thai (or the other way around?), then they renovated and became Ideal Thai (from which we got delivery and had a voucher refunded when they decided not to honor the extension they gave), and now it's Long Charm. I figured it was worth a try and ordered up a lunch special through Seamless pickup.

For $6.95 (less, with the first-time ordering discount through Seamless), you get an appetizer, salad and main course. Not a bad price.

The salad was mostly iceberg, with some shredded carrots and red cabbage. The dressing seemed like your usual creamy ginger Asian dressing but it wasn't very flavorful at all. Considering other lunch specials have better salads, this was not very impressive. It was also warm since it was under the dumplings and the box came directly on top of the hot noodles.

For my choice of appetizer, I picked 2 dumplings, which they said had chicken, shrimp and water chestnuts. I was hoping for delicious dumplings in the Noodies style where you can actually taste the ingredients and get the crunch of the water chestnuts, but these were not up to that level. Everything was ground up inside and just tasted like a mixed up meat ball inside the wrapper. Also a little bit dry.

For the main course, I got woon sen (glass/cellophane) noodles with chicken. I love pad woon sen for the glass noodles, the sauce, and the plentiful vegetables. They definitely delivered when it came to packing the noodles full of vegetables. I found string beans, carrots, celery, mushrooms, onions, cabbage (of which there were several gigantic pieces), zucchini, red peppers and scallions, which provided a nice mix in addition to the chicken and bits of egg. The flavor was pretty good (at least it tasted like pad woon sen should). I've definitely had better pad woon sen, but at least it was better than the one I got last time in the Chili Thai lunch special.

Would I order from Long Charm again? Maybe, but I might try something different. It's really cheap and you get a good amount of food for the price. But there are so many Thai places in this area with tasty lunch specials that it might be awhile.

Long Charm Thai is located on 9th Avenue near 48th Street.