Authentic Thai

There’s this thai restaurant that we go to for lunch at least once a week called Renu Nakorn.  We’ve been loyal customers since 2000.  It used to be a complete hole in the wall, but they’ve taken almost 2 years off to renovate the entire shopping plaza.  It reopened its doors last year and it’s become a cozy and modern looking restaurant ever since.  This place is jam packed with people every single day.  I’ve tried many Thai places and this is one of my top two (the other is Thai Paradise).  You know it’s authentic when you order something and it tastes unfamiliar, yet it’s good - a weird good, leaving you craving for more later on.  Did that make sense?  I didn’t think so either, so let’s go to the pictures. 

We started off with their papaya salad.  This is by far the best papaya salad ever.  It’s as close as you can get to a real thai papaya salad from Thailand.  And believe me when I say that because we’ve been to Thailand and tasted the made-to-order papaya salad that was available everywhere we went.  Whether it was on the street, in a restaurant, at a buffet or on the beach, there would be a person with a bunch of shredded or grated papaya, chili peppers, lime, peanuts, fish sauce, dried shrimp, and sugar ready to make a fresh bowl of it for you using a mortar and pestle.  And they were fast too.

Next we had the Shrimp Pad See Ew.  If you are a blog stalker from the San Gabriel Valley and happen to know about Noodle World or similar chinese cafes - this is not the same thing in any way.  The first time i’ve ever had their pad thai or pad see ew, I expected it to taste like the ones in the chinese cafes.  This is so much better - the noodles are chewy, sweet and covered in lots of egg.  The shrimp was fresh and plump, and the chinese brocoli gave it a nice crunch. 

With new restuarants popping up everyday and so many places to choose from, it’s hard enough to decide where to eat - let alone find a place that’s good. 

Just the other day, I went into a “Joe’s Taco” because I was craving some cheese enchiladas.  It’s a new restaurant and it looked pretty promising.  I’m not meaning to be stereotypical here and I hope I don’t offend anyone but I expected to see hispanic chefs.  Well.  I saw chinese chefs.  My first thought was ‘what the heck’ ?  But it was too late to walk out - I had already ordered.  Seriously, how can chinese made mexican food be good?  To make things worse, the daughter of the owners was totally bossy and I had to wait 30 minutes for my to-go order.  It was annoying and ridiculous to say the least.  When I finally got my food, I asked for jalapenos and instead of getting it herself which was right next to her, she told the cook to get it while she stood there guarding my food.  What the heck?  And why did she have to guard my food?  Whatever.  I’m thinking as long as the food is good then it’ll make up for it.  Got back to the office, took a bite of the cheese enchilada and spat it out almost instantly.  It had to be the worst enchilada i’ve ever had.  The cheese didn’t even taste like cheese and there was no enchilada sauce. 

Now that i’ve got that out of my system, I’m happy there are places like Renu.