There’s a little magic in the phrase “new Thai restaurant.”
Your ears perk up. Your mouth begins to water. Your olfactory recall kicks into high gear. Fond memories of youthful excursions to the noodle shop at the edge of town mingle palpably with a tingle that starts at the tip of your tongue and spreads swarmly to the top of your head. For many of us, the local Thai restaurant was our first true gastronomic adventure and the beginning of a life-long love affair.
When you see something you love headed down a blind street or dead-end alley, good conscience demands an intervention. Thai Terrace needs to correct its course.
The location isn’t the problem. In a space formerly occupied by the long-standing Fernandez Café, the restaurant is situated at the end of a West Vickery Street shopping strip overlooking the Chisholm Trail Parkway. It’s rough and dirty on the outside, but scruffier environs have housed superlative Thai restaurants. You could drive by the place a dozen times and barely notice the scuffed signage that somehow makes the new restaurant look like it has been there for 20 years.
The parking isn’t the problem either, though my guest and I took the last available spot on a recent rainy day — at the farthest possible point from the entrance — while the dining room was only halfway full.
The décor wasn’t even the problem, though in a generous moment it could only hope to be described as unpretentious. Other than a single blood-red wall running the length of the main dining area, there is not a hint of personality on display. It made me appreciate the horror vacui of some of the better Thai restaurants, with their gold-painted menageries gleefully splashed across every surface in sight.
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Thai Terrace
4220 W Vickery Blvd, FW. 817-377-2652. 11:30am-8:30pm Sun, 11am-2:30pm & 5-9:30pm Mon-Fri, 11am-9:30pm Sat. All major credit cards accepted.
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No, the first sign of trouble arrived with the menu: 13 appetizers, six salads, 43 entrées (each available with a choice of chicken, pork, beef, tofu, shrimp, or seafood), and four desserts. You might look around at the little restaurant, its tables draped with unhemmed vinyl, and ponder the feasibility of such an ambitious listing. How could any modest kitchen prepare such a varied array of rice dishes, soups, salads, noodles, and curries? The logistical possibilities are limited and unappealing.
But we had come for lunch, not dinner. The relatively modest lunch menu featured a mere 16 specials, each served with soup or salad, at the very reasonable price of $7.95 apiece.
The salads arrived quickly but were a bagged cafeteria-style lettuce mix topped with a sticky peanut-butter dressing and a rough-hewn chunk of tomato. It was a missed opportunity, but no real harm was done. It was about what you might expect from an inexpensive lunch.
My guest and I had taken a chance and ordered appetizers off the dinner menu. This proved to be unwise. The steamed shrimp dumplings were rubbery and fishy, and their wonton wrapper was dry. It was hard to tell whether the entire thing had come out of a freezer bag preassembled or if the constituent parts had been frozen separately. Perhaps they are better during dinner service. If so, Thai Terrace should consider printing different menus to avoid the confusion.
The fried calamari was a cry for help. The eight rubbery squid-sticks were trapped in a thick, uneven broken-batter sarcophagus more akin to an overcooked fast-food onion ring than the “tempura” advertised on the menu.
My guest enjoyed the spicy broth of her red curry, but her pork was undercooked and inedible. The Pad Thai was passable, but the sauce tasted of ketchup, and there was almost no chicken to be found among the nest of rice noodles. The Thai tea and Thai coffee were so sticky and sweet they could have come from Starbucks. Any sense of nuance was obliterated by what I hoped was nothing more sinister than an excess of corn syrup solids.
The staff seemed distracted and disinterested. Though neither my guest nor I finished anything we ordered, not one of our three servers asked if we had enjoyed our meal.
In the interest of being constructive, it must be said that there is nothing wrong with Thai Terrace that couldn’t be fixed relatively easily. A bit more attention, a little more consideration, and getting away from the more-is-better menu concept would do wonders for the place. Focusing on cooking a few things well, and with fresh ingredients, would make for a more pleasant experience for the staff as well as diners.
[box_info]Thai Terrace
Steamed shrimp dumplings $5.95
Fried calamari $6.95
Pad Thai $7.95
Red curry $7.95
Thai tea $3
Thai coffee $3[/box_info]
Your review matches my experience. My main disappointment is that Thai food has become like Indian food in Fort Worth. The menus are identical and the food tastes like it came off of a production line.
Also, why is Thai food here so sweet? I have not been to Thailand, but I cannot imagine that they spoon as much sugar into their food as I tasted at Thai Terrace. I want them to find success, but the low price can’t make up for the overly sweet dishes and bad service.