Saturday, March 04, 2006

Hire me B&J!

By my estimation the best jobs in the world are: movie critic, ice cream taster and professional napper.  Sadly I have yet to be offered any of these positions, despite a tremendous amount of experience in each area.  But I’m going to hope that the powers that be read the following resterauant review and see that I would be perfectly suited to specialize in critiquing ice cream, movies and sleeping conditions.

The Thai Pepper – located in Provo Utah.  They have an address but I’m too lazy to look it up.

We went to the Thai Pepper last night to go along with watching the movie Ghandi.  To be more accurate we could have gone to the Bombay House, and to be more comical we could have eaten hamburgers off the grill.  But we wanted to try someplace new, so the Pepper (soon to be renamed the Thai Kitchen) fit the bill perfectly.  

We arrived at about 7:30 to find the place completely full.  Although I’ve had friends who would only eat places that were full, claiming it shows that the food is good, I’ve never followed this rule.  In fact I would love to be the only person in a restaurant at any given time.  This could be my antisocial tendencies at work, but it is most definitely the most efficient way to eat.  Because the Thai Pepper was full we ended up waiting an hour for our food and got to sit elbow to elbow with 30 other people.  Neither of these won the place any points in my book.  

The décor was lacking.  I don’t really care about decorations in the slightest, but if you do, don’t go to the Thai Pepper for the ambiance.  The restaurant consists of a large rectangular room with white walls and the occasional Asian decoration.  The employees all had accents, but I have no idea whether they were Thai.  I suspect they were Laotians pretending to be Thai because no one wants to go eat Laotian food.

Were I a real critic I would’ve ordered more than one thing, but I’m actually a college student so stuck with the curry.  I love curry and am too lazy to make it myself, so must order it whenever presented the opportunity.  My date ordered curry (of a different variety) as well so I can’t really critique the whole menu for you.  The place did suffer a bit from Mexican syndrome, that is that all the food sounded the same.  There were 6 different curries, but each only had one ingredient that made it unique from the others.  But both the Pineapple (mine) and Peanut (hers) were quite tasty.  

The food was good, which is most likely the important thing.  Our particular dishes were a mere 2 stars on their spice scale.  This sounds wimpy but 4 was labeled as very hot and 5 was labeled with a question mark.  So it had enough kick to make you notice, but not enough to make you cry.  I attempt not to cry during dates, only afterward, so marked this as a plus.  Having never been to Thailand I can’t comment as to the authenticity of the dish, but again, I don’t really care about such things.  It tasted good.

Overall: it was a good experience.  However, it was no better than Thai Ruby.  The food was comparable, and the price was comparable.  Thai Ruby has the benefit of better decoration, shorter waiting and much better location.  I can walk to the Ruby in 1 minute, versus driving to the Pepper in 10 minutes.  For me the Ruby will be the obvious choice for my future curry needs.  

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Curry really is easy to make.