Pinto Thai

To conclude a long and eventful day of food shopping, we settled on this eat-in/takeaway place on the trendy Darling St strip.

Food

We arrived at around 6:15pm, and surprisngly, there were already quite a few people here. The menu contains your typical Aussie Thai dishes (curry, stir-fry) as well as a few special gems. I wasn't very hungry after constantly eating all day, but Slokky decided he was ravenous (hehe funny how shopping does such different things to people). So we ordered 3 dishes to share between two.

The first dish to arrive was the chilli jam noodles with chicken ($14.50) - the thinking behind this (from Slokky of course) was that this was meant to accompany our other dishes in place of plain rice. Well, as you can imagine, there's quite a strong taste of chilli jam, adding sweetness and sourness to the thin Thai style noodles. It's oily and sweet, the flavour certainly stand on their own. There was NO WAY I was mixing this with the hot stir fry with beef ($14.50), which had a completely different taste. This too was quite oily, but the taste was hot and salty rather than sweet. The sauce was crying out to be mopped up but alas, we had nothing to mop it up with. At this stage I wasn't blown away by anything and was beginning to feel that this was yet another Thai place to be forgotten about, when out came the piece de resistence, the soft-shelled crab salad with lychee ($23). It was expensive, but the dish was quite massive. A mess of green salad leaves mingled with flakes of red chilli and capsicum, the golden coating of the crabs, with the creamy flesh of lychee poking out. Fortunately it tasted as good as it looks. The crabs didn't have much crab taste but the batter coating it was thin and crunchy. The chilli salad dressing was excellent, hot and sour and sweet, ticking all the boxes for Thai flavour. The greens and reds help cut through the heat, and the lychee added a sweet, welcome relief. Just don't eat too many of the whole fried chilli or your throat will burn. I was absolutely stuffed after we finished the meal.

Oh, they also have these really yummy prawn crackers next to where you pay. They were crunchy, not oily and had this great spice flavour. I would go back here just to get my hands on a few more of these crackers.

Rating - 7

Atmosphere

Like most of the other places on this strip, the shop is open to the streets, with a few al-fresco table. We sat inside, quite close to the open kitchen, so we could watch all the wok-tossing action. On the outside, this place looked great, purple wall, a funky menu, squarish Asian bowls and yougn staff clad in black, but on closer inspection, you discover that all the bowls are chipped, the kitchen and the toilets are gross and the table is unstable. Who knows how they handled my food?

If you want to go to a fast and buzzing place, and don't mind the little extras, this is a great place, but if you want to go somwhere nice and enjoy the surroundings and talk, this is not the best place.

Rating - 1.5

Service

They weren't rude but they weren't very professional. There were a lot of confusion when we came in and asked to look at the menu as they thought we wanted take-away. Anyway, once we settled in and they took our order, they were actually overly attentive, they kept coming to fill up our water (which is usually a good thing until they start coming to fill up after you've had 1 sip). One of the waiter kept trying to take our dishes away, even though they weren't finished yet. I put it down to too many waiters and too few customers.

Rating - 2.5

C-factor

With the 25% discount from the e-book, our bill came to $40. Kinda expensive for your surburban Thai, but the experience was slightly (just slightly) better than average.

Rating - 1

Brownie Points - 12

Info

315 Darling St
Balmain
NSW 2041
Phone (02) 9555 6745