Thai House Restaurant

-

We started to notice that my mom's cooking improved after we started taking her to restaurants that are known for delicious food (and she's using less chicken powder on everything). So on an afternoon that Daddy was off and Anna was working close by, we decided to have an early dinner at Thai House Restaurant in Danville. According to the Michelin Guide 2019, this restaurant offers delicious food at affordable prices, leading to it being given a Bib Gourmand.


Because I've already had the pleasure of tasting Thai cuisine in Bangkok (I was there three times), I was curious to find out if Thai House's offerings had the same balance of flavours and that kick from the spiciness associated with Thai cuisine. Val visits Thailand more frequently than I did so he probably is a better judge of the similarity to Thai cooking in-country. Mommy and Daddy want to visit Thailand someday (when COVID-19 is no longer a threat) and were open to trying food that isn't sweet.



Thanks to the wee one's excitement, I was only able to take a photo of our appetiser: a platter of chicken skewers, fried tofu, vegetable rolls, and fish cakes, and an array of sauces. I barely got to taste them! The pieces were gone a few minutes after we started eating because everyone was peckish and the food was so yummy. 



I made sure that we were fully attentive to my favourite Thai dish: tom yum gai. This is a dish that I always order in Thai restaurants and is something that I want to expose my son to. He actually enjoyed sipping the soup but he didn't take much of the chicken or the vegetables; understandable because this is his first foray into Thai cooking.

We got Val some Thai red curry but nobody else dared to share because he requested for it to be spicy. He likes spicy dishes and doesn't eat spicy food at home; so having spicy curry after a long time was a real treat.

The pad Thai was exactly how I like it: noodles mixed with veggies and egg. It's one of Biboy and Barbara's go-to Thai dishes so I also got them some of it to try. I realised that pad Thai is different from pad see ew because of the noodles; pad see ew features wide rice noodles and a brown soy sauce-based flavouring while pad Thai that we got had thin rice noodles and a hint of sourness (tamarind or lemon?).

We ended our foray into Thai cuisine in Danville with sticky rice with mango and sticky black rice with Thai custard. Both were so yummy! 

The Michelin inspector who checked out Thai House Restaurant was correct: the food cooked by Executive Chef Sam Sendee was delicious and reasonably priced. What made the experience better for me was the warm hospitality of Marysa Sendee. She welcomed us with a big smile and provided a homey atmosphere that's so rarely found in the best restaurants. It's like being welcomed into a Thai home! In fact, my dining experience at Thai House reminds me a lot of my dinner at Bale Dutung sans the decathlon.

I'm already trying to find another reason to eat there.

Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you for dropping by!

Before moving on, please share your thoughts or comments about the post. :)

Thanks again!

Popular posts from this blog

Skyflakes

-
One of the more famous Philippine exports is Skyflakes , a wheat-based, salty cracker. It is one of my emergency food items: I typically have some stocked at home and in my handbag in case I become hungry (like in traffic jams). When there's no electricity and it's impractical to cook rice (because the leftover would spoil), I'd open a pack of Skyflakes and generously coat each cracker with Cheez Whiz... if I had a bottle of it within reach. Anyway, each time I spent more than two weeks outside the Philippines, I'd be elated to see boxes of Skyflakes inside Asian stores (particularly when in I was Australia and in the USA). Back then, I took it as a sign of homesickness. When I moved to California, I didn't miss Skyflakes because Mommy made sure that there's a steady supply in the house. Skyflakes is embedded in Filipino gastronomy as a snack, a panawid-gutom , that anyone who reacts positively upon seeing Skyflakes outside the Philippines must have spe
Read more

10 things I learned while driving on Marcos Highway to Baguio City

-
I went on a day trip to the City of Pines, which was around a 700-km drive from my house. I drove  going up there and then from the city to Victoria, Tarlac. After that, my dad took over the driving duties. It was day trip with Tita Ising and Tito Sibing with us. Anyway, this trip was my first time to go to Baguio City with me behind the wheel. As everyone who drives up knows, there are three main routes to Baguio from the lowlands: Kennon Road, which ascends from Rosario, La Union. It was out of my options because it's too dangerous to use that road in the rainy season. The second route is via Naguilian Road, which makes my trip a lot longer because the beginning of the ascent is in Bauang, La Union (further north). The last route, and the one I took, was the Marcos Highway, now known as the Aspiras-Palispis Highway. This 47-km road starts from Agoo, La Union and is touted as the safest route among the three.  As I drove up and then down (on the same day; we were in Bagu
Read more

Surat Mangyan

-
Image
In high school, part of the Filipino curriculum was learning about one of the country's ancient native scripts called Baybayin . I learned back then that this script was eventually abandoned because the Spanish, and eventually the Americans, encouraged the use of the Latin script for written communications. But that's in the lowlands; the rules were different up in the mountains. In the lush mountains of Mindoro, groups of indigenous people called Mangyans  live largely in isolation away from the Christianised Filipinos. This isolation has led to the continuous development of the Mangyans' old script, Surat Mangyan . As I walked inside the Ayala Museum , I saw this bamboo tube (I'm not sure if it's an instrument) with Mangyan script written all over it. I suppose that this was equivalent to a book or a song. But I haven't figured out what's written yet, despite the translation guide provided. What I can do, however, is write my name in Ma
Read more