Must Be Thai

I came here on a Sunday night by joining the waitlist and we were seated immediately! Good: - Nice upscale but not overly fancy ambiance! - The tom yum fried rice was super unique! I liked how it was sweet and sour - I liked the pad Thai here - Portion sizes are large! - We got the meatballs, and the fish meatball was my favorite, super chewy and tasty Bad: - Took a while for the food to arrive - Mango sticky rice mango was a little unripe Overall the food here was about what I expected, maybe a little bit better than average.

Amazing food. Definitely recommend this restaurant. We ordered green Thai curry (vegetarian) it was delicious. It’s quite popular place, as we had to wait 15 mins to get a table. And it’s totally worth it. Even the jasmine tea is good.

Got the fresh spring rolls, veggie pastry, Tom yum chicken soup, green and panang curry. Everything was delicious. Staff is very courteous and responsive. Nice place for a weeknight dinner.

We've now been to this restaurant twice. I believe the menu changed significantly between both visits. I can't for the life of me remember what the menu was like or what we ate the first time. I know it must have been good because my wife had been asking to come back for some time. I think it was a fairly standard Thai menu. On our second visit, the menu seemed much more modern and innovative. We have no cultural ties to Thailand or experience traveling there, so we aren't able to determine with any authority what constitutes authentic Thai cuisine, but the menu now has a bunch of trendy section and item names which suggest twists on classics you would find at other Thai restaurants. Even so, nothing we ordered tasted like fusion. It all felt authentically Thai. The menu sections were themed around different regions of Thailand. Again, I can't say from experience, but it really feels like they pulled off a very authentic, regionally diverse Thai menu in an otherwise familiar American Thai restaurant setting. So how was the food? It was excellent, some of the best I've had in a while. A lot of ingredients are rather rare in American cuisine of any ethnic background. For example, the dish I ordered had young peppercorns, which blew me away. I'm so used to eating around the peppercorns in Chinese cuisine, but the young peppercorns were very mild in flavor and cooked quite nicely, to the point that I was able to eat them as part of the dish. My wife was making fun of me for enjoying them so much because she was convinced they were just there to flavor the sauces, but they really tasted quite nice, and I had never seen them used in any menu of any kind in my life. The dish also had crispy pork belly, and it was cooked to such perfection that it honestly matches the best restaurants I've ever been to. I've never been to a Michelin-starred restaurant, so it's hard for me to say what qualifies, but this is how I imagine those places tasting. Their new menu was that good. The quality of the food makes the less-than-perfect parts of the experience that much more noticeable. We called in advance to check if they were open on Christmas Eve, and their automated menu was full of dead ends that didn't answer our questions or get us to a real person. Their Yelp waiting list didn't work from the app remotely, so we had to drive there just to verify they were open and get on the waiting list from their tablet. The wait service was good, but not outstanding. Sides of rice seem way too expensive, $4 for a small bowl. I don't even care that their main menu items are a bit pricey (it is post-pandemic Bay Area, after all, and the food is worth it), but to pay fairly high prices for something like curry and then to have to pay $4 just to add a small bowl of rice to mix with it feels a bit wrong. Most Thai restaurants either include rice or charge around $2 for it, making it a reasonable optional upcharge for those who want it, but $4 is enough that a lot of people are going to forego the rice they want and have a subpar experience with otherwise really delicious food. One last thing which is more of a tech flaw but still hurts the experience is that parties of 5+ are automatically charged gratuity, but then the checkout prompt asks for gratuity without clarifying that it has already been included in the price. You just have to be very cautious of not double-paying gratuity. We will certainly be back, as there are so many interesting items on the new menu we want to try. But this restaurant just barely snatches greatness from the jaws of perfection, and I am really hoping they can smooth out the rough edges because the food and atmosphere really are second to none.

This place is near the Santana Row area so we went during the holiday season to see the Christmas decorations while also enjoying great food! We did need to wait a bit to get seated as there was a waitlist but the food was really nice! We ordered the chicken panang curry, pad kee maw, veggie sriracha noodles and veggie pad thai. The reason I deducted 1 star is because the server kept forgetting items that we had ordered. She didn't get a lemonade stand ordered and also forgot that the sriracha noodles were ordered vegetarian no eggs. Hopefully it was just a busy night and isn't always the case!