Can we keep it short? Don’t eat here. Now we have time to discuss the real question: why is it so difficult to adapt Thai food to our modern, mall-obsessed lifestyles? Villa Ari is packed with Japanese restaurants—too many to count, in fact. Even the steak house is now a Japanese restaurant. And then there’s this lonely Thai kitchen, which manages to draw in the occasional tourist, and is (justifiably) snubbed by locals. Can’t we eat Thai food in a mall? However sad, the harsh cold shoulder treatment is warranted. The décor mixes bare cement, the stuff tourists pick up at JJ, tacky Chinese furniture and a big, gurgling fountain. The owner decided this nauseating setup was reason enough to charge B200, plus service charge, for a green curry that tastes more off-the-shelf than fresh from the market (forget homemade). The perfectly shaped shrimp “cakes” (rings, actually) even have us wondering if there’s not some industrial frozen food involved here. We detected freezer burn on our last visit, while the mix is light on shrimps, big on flour and, well, stuff. Things can get even worse if you follow the waitress’ recommendations, who picks all her dishes off a special menu that features no prices. At the end of your meal, you’ll find out those baked mussels were B50 a piece, and those three shrimps B300. Fairly big and with a fatty head, neither they nor the accompanying chopped lemongrass are fresh enough. Other dishes can be plain weird, like the sam rot seabass, which comes drowned in a saccharine pineapple mush, with chunks of pineapple, and a side of sliced pineapple. As long as malls keep cranking out Thai restaurants like these, we’ll follow the crowds and stick to Japan. No corkage. 10% service charge.
