THAILAND 🇹ðŸ‡
For many years Wondee Siam, while still not quite at the level of the restaurants in Elmhurst that Eater.com just found out existed, has been a reliable source of Thai food in Hell's Kitchen, whether it be for lunch or a group dinner with folks you could never get to come out to Queens. Recently they opened a small noodle house next door, so stopping in to check up on things a couple times was recently necessary.
One side of the menu reads a lot like the offerings next door, but stick to the noodle soups for now, which are the highlight as you can guess from the name. One unfortunate part is letting customers decide their own noodle types for each soup, which actually go better with specific kinds of noodles. If you do not feel comfortable making this decision please ask the server to direct you to a dish's best noodle.
If it doesn't show up on its own, ask for the condiment tray.
For example, thin noodles should be used for the Sukhothai noodle ($13.95, below), a tom yum noodle soup that can be very hard to pull off well. Besides being very timid to put heat in the soups of their customers, the bowl has most everything right. The amount of chilis and sourness can be easily fixed with the condiment tray that should arrive at your table after ordering (above).
A bowl of Sukhothai noodles, named for the central city it hails from, is a masterpiece of flavor combinations and always includes ingredients that can be counted into the double digits. A slight sweetness comes from the abundance of peanuts which are dusted over cuts of roast pork and ground pork. String beans and bean sprouts are populated in the broth with garlic, scallions, cilantro, pepper, and the secret recipes of the kitchen.
Slightly less successful but still satisfying is a bowl of nam tok noodle ($13.95, below), available in both pork and beef versions. This is the soup usually translated to pork blood soup, but despite ordering the pork version there did not seem to be any hint of blood found within. Probably another thing that Hell's Kitchen is just not ready for, unless you ask ahead of time.
After finishing half the bowl, it was noticed that pork blood was nowhere to be found in the listing of ingredients, and as seen below the focus seems to be more on the dried pork skin that covers everything. After a lot of work with chilis and vinegar from the condiment tray, the bowl was in good shape.
Quite disappointing and not recommended is yen ta fo ($14.95, below), which should be requested with flat noodles (sometimes vermicelli is preferred as in the bowl here). This seafood soup in a broth made pink by the combination of spicy, tangy, and sweet ingredients used. Unfortunately, nothing in the bowl was of note to bring the level of enjoyment up.
With 12 different noodle soup options, some were bound to excel and some were bound to fail. Eating these types of dishes in Thailand would probably take you to 12 different noodle shops that all specialize in one specific type, so it is understandable when one kitchen tries to pull everything off it could take a while to tweak.
For now the Sukhothai is the stand out, and if any of the other nine are worth mentioning on return visits, the page will be updated. Do you have a favorite?
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