Tida Isaan is, inexplicably, one of the restaurants responsible for Soi Rangnam’s reputation as a great place for Isaan food. It’s also a restaurant that has us questioning the sanity of Bangkokians. There are a couple much better places to eat Isaan food in the neighborhood and you don’t have to walk very far to find them. Granted, the kitchen can turn on the heat, despite its strong following of tourists and neighborhood expats, and it’s very affordable, but that’s about all there is going for it. Somtam poo is overly crispy and green, barely pounded, with none of the juices having either penetrated the papaya or escaped the little crab. The sun-dried beef’s texture is just as disappointing—chewy’s fine, tougher than an old leather shoe is pushing it. The beef in the yam neua with eggplant is worse, though—a sad grey thing bathed in a lopsided sauce. In fact, you rarely get the right balance of all four Thai flavors in the dishes here. Most, like the yam pla duk fu (spicy deep-fried minced catfish salad), are short on lime and big on salt. Fish isn’t much more successful, such as the oily, deep-fried snake head fish in gaeng som. The mix of cauliflower, tomato and cabbage in the soup doesn’t really help. And then you get the complete misfires, like the bloody clams served stone cold on our last visit. Tida isn’t exactly a tourist trap (it’s cheap and half of the clients are Thai, after all) but we still can’t figure out why it’s crowded on any given night. The redecoration (now a couple years old) is decent, with those white Charles Eames chairs and wood-paneled walls, but nothing to throw an issue of Wallpaper Magazine at either. It’s also noisy and, at peak hours, you’ll get fairly slow service (sometimes for only one of your dishes, which can be particularly annoying). Here’s our theory: this popular place is simply the closest to the BTS. And here’s our tip: just make the minimal effort to push a bit further into the soi.
Corkage B50.
