Sawadee Thai Cuisine, Tan Quee Lan Street

Sawadee Thai Cuisine (9 Tan Quee Lan Street, tel : +65 6238 6833) is slightly upmarket restaurant, not the street food kind of place for Thai food. The food is not unfamiliar, just a little more refined and for certain dishes, are elevated by more expensive ingredients. Kinda like Gin Khao. 

I gathered that they've been around for quite a while but they're obviously one of those places that has evaded my attention all these while. Apparently, they've been listed in the top 5 Thai restaurants here for a few years.

We had panaeng roasted duck curry. Panaeng curry is a type of red, rich curry that's a little sweet and salty and nutty. Something that is an excellent accompaniment to steamed white rice. Sawadee's version has shreds of roasted duck (with skin!), lychee (amazingly good in the curry) and pineapple (not the canned variety!). Recalling back, the first time I've had these was back in Baan Khanita. That one had baby eggplants and grapes.

In recent years, I've discovered in myself a little fandom for Thai salads. Namely the variety more commonly seen like som tam (papaya), yum som o (pomelo) and som tam mamuang (green mango). That's the yum som o. This particular rendition doesn't have toasted coconut but seemed to have a flavour that tasted like honey. Oddly couldn't taste the fish sauce too. The pomelo that they used also did not have so much citrus that I would have preferred.

But I still kinda liked it.

Those crab spring rolls por pea poo were supposed to be appetizers that arrived at the post appetizer stage of the meal. They were pretty good. The fried skin was really fragrant, not simply flat and greasy like many other fried spring rolls.

Stir fried bean sprouts with fish maw and eggs. Three ingredients that I like. Amongst many. Putting them together just made sense for us to order it.

We had their grilled Kurobuta pork collar - known as khor moo Kurobuta yang on the menu. This came from the appetizer section of the menu and arrived last. While it was pretty tasty, I thought that it would have benefitted from a little more char and I couldn't help but feel that the use of Kurobuta wasn't necessary in making the dish better. We've had equally good ones that was done with regular pork.

Dessert was steamed tapioca with coconut milk. These sweetened tapioca were steamed on order and tasted good. None of those old fibrous root in there.