Pure Thai

Purely based on their local advertising, we decided to head as a group to Berala and give Pure Thai a try. It was dinner time on Good Friday and the restaurant was around half full. 

The wait staff were friendly enough, placing water on the table, and taking our order when we were good and ready. They were quite on the ball especially when we called beforehand to see if they were open... they even reserved a large table for us.

We started with an order of salt and pepper squid... I think this is where the experience already started to fall apart. The batter on this was heavy like it was trying to mask the frozen product underneath. Normally salt and pepper squid is cooked with a light batter that's well seasoned and garnished so there's no need for such Western sauce pairings as sweet chilli sauce... It just reminded me of calamari rings at a local fish and chip shop....

We then had the Green Curry with vegetables and tofu. There was no spice level what-so-ever to this dish and it had a unusual dominant sweet taste to it...

In one of the large servings of rice... we found an ant in it... dead of course... to which the waiter apologised and brought us a new batch. Well I hope he did and not just removed the ant and gave us the same bowl... to which I wouldn't be surprised anyways...

We then had the Ox Tongue. Depending on the piece you got it was quite hit and miss. i sampled around 5-6 pieces and half of them were tough and chewy and the other half cooked to perfection. The highlight was definitely the sauce they paired it with... it worked well..

The Seafood Pad Thai was very overcooked and the noodles were soggy... so much so it kept sticking to the sides of my mouth like some type of leech... even the flavouring was quite bland and unappealing...

Then we had the soft shell crab papaya salad. The salad was soaked in sauce which left minimum crunch to the papaya and the soft shell crab was heavily battered and quite oily as well... almost masking the taste of the soft shell crab itself...

Then they also forgot one of our curry dishes which we ended up cancelling at the end... even though they never got more busier than half a restaurant the entire time we were there...

I'm not sure what's going on here... I've come to accept that most of Sydney barely serves a true authentic Thai experience... but this is a bit too far to tolerate. How can so many dishes be done so poorly and then passed on the local diners that might not know any better...There's just no love for their food here... obviously another place who's just in it to make the moolah. With the greater part of Sydney swamped with Thai options... this would not be in my list of recommendations...