Thai-rrific was a North Dallas favorite until it moved to Oak Lawn last year. And since I live around there, I am sure glad it did.
Despite the Cedar Springs address, the restaurant fronts Throckmorton Street. Big windows provide a view of the well-lit dining room and its diners: concrete floor, tables topped with white paper over white clothes and black banquettes, two-tops and four-tops of boys from the hood drinking bottles of wine they brought in themselves.
We were seated at a half banquette/half table set up in a cozy corner and proceeded to fill our bellies.
We started with the pik gai yut, or stuffed wings. Our waitress said it was the house specialty. Essentially it was two large chicken sausages shaped like wings. What I mean by that is that ground chicken was mixed with cilantro, onions, rice, and lemongrass and kind of formed into wing shapes before being roasted and sliced and presented in a brown sauce. Lip-smacking good.
We moved on to pad see ew, a dish of wide, flat noodles and veggies: thin-sliced carrots, bite-size broccoli, and zucchini slices the size of my pinkie. You can add meat if you want to; we did not. The menu warns this is not a saucy dish, but it is by no means dry. There was plenty of brown sauce to make it juicy and flavorful.
Six fat shrimp sat atop our praram, lightly sauteed red and white cabbage and broccoli in a curry-peanut sauce. Of our three entrees, this was the one we ate the most of. There were no leftovers to take home.
There was also no coconut curry to choose from, so we went with a yellow curry dish called gang karee. Big hunks of white potato, thin-sliced carrots, and slivers of chicken swam in a flavorful yellow curry. Though we ordered all three entrees “medium heat,” this one seemed to have more heat than the others – enough to create a temporary ring of fire around my mouth.
Service was friendly and efficient, though our waitress kept stepping on my dining partner’s feet. Apparently they both wear giant shoes.
Various brightly colored cakes fill a dessert case by the door. And one many-layered cake, each layer a different color for a rainbow nod to the neighborhood, sat under a glass dome. We skipped the sweets, but that chocolate frosting sure did look good.
4000 Cedar Springs Road
Dallas, TX 75219
972-241-2412
Sun-Thu, 11 am-10 pm
Fri & Sat, 11 am-4 am
