I’ve been to this place several times and generally enjoyed myself.  Courtney was never quite as excited about it, but she agreed to go there with me last night.

The menu at Twisted Noodles is a little overwhelming.  It includes a bunch of Thai restaurant traditionals, several house specials, and a bunch of creative noodle dishes. To start we ordered the summer rolls, which were indistinguishable from the spring rolls sold at other Asian restaurants, and the Tom Kha coconut soup with chicken.  The rolls were great, full of fresh veggies and cold rice noodles.  They didn’t come with peanut sauce, which is kind of a downer.  The soup didn’t come as an appetizer but was brought to us with our meal.  They did not bring small bowls nor a serving utensil, though we did find one ceramic white soup spoon floating around in the broth.  The soup was sub-par—mostly warm coconut milk with some flavorless chicken and rock hard ginger and galanga roots.  There was way too much milk/broth, and the $8.50 price tag seemed excessive.  It’s a good thing I wasn’t too hungry.

The soup came at the same time as our shared entree of Drunken Noodles, one of the fun unorthodox dishes on the menu.  This dish is generally superb—big fat rice noodles lightly fried in the wok and tossed with carrots, green beans, bell peppers, onions, and meat, beef in our case.  We ordered it spicy but didn’t taste much spice, and the cooking oil tasted a little old and dirty.  We had to ask twice for plates to share.  (Sharing isn’t that crazy at most Thai restaurants…)  It seemed like an off night overall for both their kitchen and wait staff.  When we finished eating we sat for what seemed like an eternity before being visited by our waiter, who didn’t offer us dessert.  We waited a while after getting the check before a woman came and picked it up—and then promptly dropped it on the floor, sending my credit card flying across the restaurant.  At least the beer was good—it was a 22oz Laobeer, product of the PDR Laos.

The beer got me thinking about the restaurant’s particular niche in the larger world of Asian-American cuisine.  I thought to myself, “Could the lousy Tom Kha stem from the fact that these people aren’t really Thai?”  The dining room is adorned with large but cheap photos from Thailand’s tourism office, featuring dark-skinned people bathing with elephants or in a market or pale-skinned tourists enjoying kayaks or a beautiful white beach.  Otherwise the decor was classy if modern (see photo in previous post), though the shades on the windows didn’t keep Courtney from being blinded by the setting sun.  There were no pictures of the royal family of Thailand, just a nationality-free Buddhist shrine in one corner.  They did sell Singha beer, a Thai staple.  Alas, the restaurant’s website calls itself “authentic Thai,” and far be it for me to question their authenticity.  All I know is that the food was overpriced and kinda sucked, and I’ll be hard-pressed to go back there for a while… perhaps I could find a Laotian restaurant, complete with Laobeer and their own PDR Laos Department of Tourism propaganda posters?

If you want great Thai, keep looking.  If you want just the noodles, try it out.  But don’t try to share the soup!  And if you find good Laotian food, let me know