first thai

Sharon's colleague Christine introduced her to this Thai restaurant and she swears by it. Being the crazy foodies we are, we wasted no time checking this place out. I've been wanting to go to a proper authentic Thai restaurant to flaunt my Thai abilities after taking a course in Thai. (Alas, I've forgotten the most part of it)

First Thai Food turned out to be situated in an old-school coffeeshop setting. It seemed very promising and I immediately conjured up thoughts of authentic piping hot tom yum soup in cheapo metal bowls. There's a certain rustic charm about these coffee-shops that I cannot resist.

Parking is a problem if you are driving, because there are only limited PARALLEL parking lots. (It's a big problem for me la ok.)

The menu, which is a bit unsettling for me. I'm guessing it's a thai girl there. But she looks nothing like a Thai. in fact, I think she looks almost Indian. I think it's the huge huge eyes.

Mango salad. We ordered it "phet maak dai mai" which means literally means "very spicy, can or not?" (I told you I need to show off a bit right?) Well phet (spicy) it was. Not crazily spicy but with a very satisfactory kick to it. The mangoes were very fresh, and just unripe so they were still very firm and crunchy. Somehow, they weren't very sour as I find mango salads are wont to be. The zest was just right. We were very impressed by this unassuming dish. Very good.


We had a crabmeat fried rice. This was amazing. The crabmeat was sweet and succulent; they were generous with their serving, the rice was perfectly dry and fluffy and individually encased in that adored wok-hei. After the mango salad and this, I couldn't wait for what was coming up!

The tom yum was great. They were so generous with the ingredients that the soup was cloudy with the precipitate. I've never had clear tomyum made murky like this before. The bowl was literally overflowing with ingredients. Very very good.

The soup tasted great. It was very authentic, with that sour-sweet-spicy thing down pat. We spotted occasional chicken pieces (treasure!!) and the chicken was oh-so-soft. The prawns however, were not very fresh. Other than that, it was good.

Chicken fried with cashew nuts. I did not like this. There were more cashew nuts than chicken. More chicken skin than chicken meat. In short, where's the chicken?! It was also way too salty for my liking. I felt like I was chewing on deep fried chicken skin doused in gravy.

The hotplate tofu did not taste very Thai and we were disappointed with this too. I thought it was very average and Sharon thought it was too salty.

There were more hits than misses. I would say this is a good place for some-what authentic Thai food although I think that it is slightly overrated. There must be a better Thai restaurant waiting to be discovered. That's why we call our blog next-stop-ambrosia right?

First Thai Food
23 Purvis Street

ThaiExpress

As with every restaurant with multiple branches, there will always be branches better than others. We like Sushi-Tei at Raffles City, Akashi at Orchard Parade Hotel, Canele at Robertson Quay, MacDonald's at Amk Ave 6...

When it comes to ThaiExpress, we like the one at Raffles City and the one at Holland V. The last time we were at Raffles City, service sucked so bad. They were understaffed, underexperienced, horrible.

We waited to be shown a table but there was no one to bring us to the table. So we stood there looking at an empty table, knowing that could be our seat but were not shown to the seat. We had to call the manager in, and tell him hey there's an empty table there, can we sit there? We had to show ourselves in!

Then, food took horribly long to come. I really mean HORRIBLY long. After half an hour, SOUP came. Not even the main dishes. And these stuff are already pre-prepared, the waiting time was simply crazy. We asked two different waiters to check on our orders. None came back to us. We had to push and push and push the waiters. We had to remind them to check a simple thing like how much we have ordered twice. Service was horrible. There wasn't even service recovery. Thank goodness the food was good.

The tomyum soup here is especially sweet. This was why we came back here, because we thought that this branch served better food. And the tomyum soup was really good. I ordered the tomyum soup with fish and glass noodles.

I eat a lot of chilli yes. This is not even all that I added.

This is the final product. I'm not kidding when I say I like chilli. This was one fiery tomyum soup. My tongue felt a bit numb after this.

But disregarding the chilli, the soup by itself is really better than the ones served other branches. It's very very sweet, the tomyum taste is a lot more intense and even without adding chilli, it has a bit of kick already. (If I don't add chilli I don't normally feel the kick) The taste is the same, just that it's more 'gao' here. This means that the proportion is exactly the same except that the cooks are more generous here?

The glass noodles were chewy and absorbed the robust soup to perfection. I still prefer the Korean type, which is thicker and chewier and absorbs the flavours better, but this will do.

The fish was a bit overdone and mushy but you're at ThaiExpress, you don't expect gourmet standard, do you? I don't.

Crayfish in red tomyum soup with glass noodles. We thought this would also be good at Raffles City. I did not like this. The crayfish was sadly overcooked and did not fall from its shell willingly. We had to pry it apart.

The cooks here really are heavy-handed with the sugar man. It's not just the clear tomyum soup, even this tomyum was sweet. This was too sweet. It tasted like mee siam. It even looks like mee siam. It's so thick too, it looked more like gravy/curry than soup. But other than that, Sharon enjoyed this.

Seems like not everything is better at this branch. For the crayfish in red tomyum (which is fiery and robust compared to the clear tomyum, as must have for chilli-lovers) go to the Holland V branch. It's good.

ThaiExpress
Raffles City Shopping Centre
252 North Bridge RoadB1-13/14
The Raffles MarketPlace
Singapore 179103