1324 Peabody Ave

Memphis, TN 38104

901-272-1538

http://www.bhanthairestaurant.com

Their website declares they are the best Thai food in Memphis, TN. Debatable.

Thai food and Memphis hardly go together. When visiting Memphis one expects to find BBQ, fried chicken, you know, that good old Southern Style cooking. Thai doesn’t exactly fit but we gave it a shot.

The atmosphere was warm and inviting with deep yellow painted over the walls mixing beautifully with deep woods surrounding the windows. And well, I’m a sucker for hardwood flooring and Asian arts decorating the walls and fire place mantel. But that’s about where the magic stopped for me.

T and I ordered crab rangoons for our appetizer and were disappointed with the rather greasy, near crab-less tidbits we were presented.  The sweet and sour sauce presented with the rangoons was tangy, too tangy and no balance with anything sweet. It’s bitterness was rather overwhelming.

For our entrees I chose Thai fried rice with fried tofu while T got Chang Mai noodles.

All I could think while eating my supper was: How do you make Thai food bland? How is Thai food bland? I was terribly disappointed, terribly. I was expecting flavor, spice, some sort of wow factor that is missing from many American Midwest dishes. It just wasn’t there. I had to steal my niece’s peanut sauce (clearly made from creamy peanut butter) just to get any sort of flavor. Not even half way through my meal, I gave up.

I snitched a bite of T’s dinner and wasn’t much more impressed. All heat, no flavor. T was disappointed with the curry element of her dish. It really wasn’t a curry sauce, it was more a peanut sauce “with heat”, as she described it. 

While yes, the restaurant had a romantic setting located in an older Memphis house, and the servers were pleasant, the food just had no wow factor…at all. This is not a place we will be returning to, though we will be making several trips to the wonderful city of Memphis.