Spicy Thai – Thai Cafe @ Aljunied Ave 2

We were recommended by my BIL’s parents to try out this thai place after visiting my darling baby nephew. 🙂 They told us that the food is pretty authentic and told us to give it a try since we were scratching our head as to where to head to for dinner.

Flipping through the menu, this really caught my eye – Moo Ka Ta & Jim Jum, basically thai style BBQ and steamboat! As the weather was far too hot and my dining companions were not that keen to get hot and sweaty with BBQ and steamboat, we settled for the standard thai dishes.

There were 4 different types of chillis to choose from. From what I could recall, the top left hand one is made with bean paste, the top right is with soya and some herbs, the bottom left is really spicy made with thai green chilli and the bottom right is basically cut chilli padis.

I chose the green one and the herbs one as the latter was really fragrant and goes well with the food.

I always order the Thai Ice Tea, $2 whenever I go to really Authentic Thai Restaurants as I find that the taste of the tea is so much stronger and richer. The thai ice tea here could do with a few more swirls of condense milk though. 😛

Mum’s hot lemongrass tea with less sugar, $1.50. The sugar that used here is infused with pandan leaves hence you get double fragrance when drinking it.

Service was very prompt and our table was filled very quickly as one dish after another was dished out of the kitchen and placed on our table.

Coconut Tom Yum Soup (Red) 冬炎海鲜汤, $18.

There are 2 types of Tom Yum soup here and we opted for the red one (as above) that was served in a claypot. The other type is just a normal clear tom yum soup with the standard seafood. The difference with this tom yum soup is that it is cooked with the juice of a coconut and the flesh of the coconut was also added into it. It was filled with prawns, mussels, fish,sotong, straw mushrooms,etc and the coconut flesh of course!

Close up of the tender flesh of the coconut

The flesh of the coconut that was easily mistaken as cuttlefish! The soup was spicy and shiok! Drink slowly and don’t choke! haha..

Dill Pattle (Cha Om) Omelette, $8.

We ordered this dish on the recommendation the service staff. He explained that this is a very special vegetable directly imported from Thailand that tasted faintly like the petai that we wanted to order.

Close up of the omelette.

The vegetable is very thin and after eating it, we could not detect the taste of the petai as it was covered by the taste of the egg. I guessed either we are used to food with very strong flavours or whatever dishes we had before this dish came covered its taste! An interesting dish nevertheless.

Top view of the Pineapple Fried Rice 泰式黄梨炒饭,$6

This is an item that I will usually order. The special part of the dish here is that it is accompanied with deep fried sausages which I quite like. It was a little hard but the flavour is slowly released as you chew on it. Best with a nice cold beer! 😀

Stir-fry Phad Thai With Seafood 泰式海鲜炒粿条 , $6.

Another dish that I will definitely order. The phad thai here is cooked with tomato paste which I do not really fancy although it was nice too. I still prefer the fish sauce kind.

My tasting portion of half rice half noodles plate. Between the rice and the Phad Thai, I would choose the rice here.

Crispy Lad Na With Seafood 酥炸海鲜河粉, $6 – This dish caught my sister’s eye and we decided to order it it as it is a very interesting dish that we have not seen anywhere else.

A plate of deep fried to golden brown rice noodles (hor fun)…

..accompanied by a bowl of gravy with loads of ingredients served by the side.  The rice noodles are deep fried till it is crispy on the outside and yet retain the starchiness on the inside. They have so thoughtfully separated the gravy so that the rice noodles will not be soggy and lose its crispiness if they had served the gravy on top. Hence, you can just dip the crispy hor fun into the gravy when you want to eat it. An interesting dish but the hor fun can be improve by making it more crispy by reducing the thickness of the noodles.

Deep Fried Sea Bass with Mango Salad泰式芒果沙拉鱼,$34. 

A fish and a salad dish combination, why not? 

The sea bass has been nicely split into half and deep fried.

Close up of the mango salad served with the deep fried sea bass. It was quite refreshing though it lean on the sweet side. We love this salad so much that we decided to add on a plate of it on its own.

We decide to drizzle the mango salad over the fish for it to soak up the sweetness from the sauce in the salad.

Mango Salad 芒果沙拉 , $6. The mando salad that we added on.

Close up of the Mango Salad.

This one tasted quite different from the one that came with the fish! It was very very spicy and tasted more salty than sweet while the one that came with the fish was more acceptable as it was not that spicy! The service staff explained that the seasoning for both salads have been adjusted accordingly to enhance the flavour of what they accompanied. On its own, it is more savoury and the flavours need to stand out and hence more fish sauce and chilli was used. While when accompanied with the fish, it has to be more mellow so that it does not cover the taste of the fish. The spiciness of the chilli, as explained, was due to the hot spell recently. The hotter the weather, the spicier the chilli. So do beware when adding chillis grown in the hot and dry weather into your food as they tend to be much more spicy!

Overall, a nice place to dine in and it is definitely OK to wear your singlets and shorts there as you will probably be sweating buckets from the heat from the food! Tissue paper is a MUST! LOL. A plus point is that they accept NETs and credit cards too on top of cash so  you do not have to worry about not having cash on hand! Will be back to try out the Moo Ka Ta!

 

Spicy Thai-Thai Cafe
By Aroi-Thai Kitchen Ptd Ltd
Blk 115 Aljunied Ave 2
#01-35
Singapore 380115
Tel:67478558
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SpicyThaiThaiCafe
Opening Hours: Daily from 11am to 12 midnight