I have to give a so-so review for Nava Thai. For those who love the place, more power to you. If you haven't gone yet, make sure you set aside at least an hour and a half if you're dining during peak hours, and expect the food to be saltier than other Thai places.
We were so excited to go after reading Tom Sietsema's glowing recommendation in the Post magazine. We got there about 5:45 PM on a Sunday evening, about 3 weeks after the Post mention, and we got a table right away. To start, we had the Floating Market Noodle Soup and Tom Yum soup. Both were very delicious; the Floating Market soup was the first time I'd had anything with flavors like that. It's reason enough to go to try for that as an appetizer at least once. Next, we had their Pad Thai, Lard Na (Thai chow fun), Crispy Pork Krapow, and Hoi Tod (crispy pan fried battered mussels). It took over 30 minutes for those dishes to come out, and half of them were cold (not even warm -- they apparently don't keep the plates hot). If I went again, I'd ask them to bring out dishes as soon as each one is made.
Portion sizes were laughable, even for a Thai place. What they did is use heaps of bean sprouts as filler on the sides of most entrees. If a normal Pad Thai entree is perhaps 1/2 lb. of noodles, this had about 1/4 to 1/3 lb. The flavor was good however. The Lard Na was very small (again about 1/4 lb. of noodles and a few slices of beef), and the Crispy Pork Krapow was literally about 12 bite-size pieces of pork, however, they were extremely tasty (and fatty). The Hoi Tod was a really strange dish. We were expecting whole mussels or at least something resembling them, but the pieces were more like mussel-flavored fried eggs, as if they just smashed mussel juice into the eggs. Don't order this dish. All of the dishes except the Pad Thai were a tad on the salty side.
We were just underwhelmed and probably had too high of an expectation going in. As much as we wanted to like it, we would probably not go again.
