Kao Thai

[deangold]

8650 Colesville Rd

Replacing Thai Flavor, a place that I wanted to like a lot more than I did, this is a cute almost to the point of precious Thai that might be great neighborhood joint. We had three dishes, all good to very good, although one of the dishes was simply not a true interpretation of the dish described.

First the very good:

Larb Gai was chopped chicken with lime, some good hotness (we did not order it spicy but just normal} and very good ingredients. I would have liked the sauce flavors to be better blended with the meat but all in all a very good example.

Som Tum is our go to dish at Thai Restaurants. It is a rare outing where we don't order this. This Som Tum was very good with nicely crunchy green papaya with a little funk from pounded shrimp. Again,we did nt specify spicy and it was nicely hot but the flavors just muted anough to keep it from the excellent category.

I bet both these dishes would ahve been excellent if we had ordered them "Thai spicy" but they would have been too spicy for Kay.

The last dish we ordered was Jungle Curry. Here are a few images of Jungle Curry from Google. The Jungle Curry we got had sliced pork and bamboo shoot instead of the chopped pork and shredded bamboo of most of the version I have had. It also was a stir fry and was not soupy like the pictured versions. If it had been sold as a stir fry of bamboo & eggplant with sliced pork, it might have filled the boll well, if a little on the sweet side. But as a Jungle Curry it was a definite miss.

We will definitely be back to explore the menu and hopefull the flavors will be less muted next time as we order more dishes "spicy "

Service was friendly is still a little ackward and stiff, but I'll take that over the pushy service we got our last three times at Nava Thai.

They will have a beer & wine liscense May 1. Tiny.

Our rank order of Thai in the general Silver spring area now is Siriwan by a hair over Kao Thai but eash of getting to would be the deciding factor {coming from Dino KT and coming from home S}, both miles ahead of Nava Thai {more on the service issues than the food}. Another visit to KT may change this ranking.