Food is the main reason we return to a restaurant. We can bear lame decorations or lousy service if the kitchen is making fantastic dishes, but we’d rather not torture ourselves with bad food, which is unfortunately what we found at Wakamala. The restaurant looks promising from the outside; the two-story house is lovely and surrounded by a landscaped garden studded with large trees. The interior is not so impressive, and not having many customers doesn’t help the atmosphere. On this Saturday night, the place was quiet, with only one other table soaking up the silence. This surprised us, because other restaurants on this soi were doing brisk business, and Wakamala has received a lot of (positive) attention in the media. The lack of people certainly isn’t due to the service: The waiters are friendly and welcoming, polite and attentive. (Though it’s not hard when there are only two tables.) And it can’t be due to the interior, which is simple and clean, bathed in yellow from ceiling lamps enclosed in wood birdcages. Under the glass-topped tables are dry Thai spices in buckets looking more messy than decorative. Never mind. We aren’t really artistic people. We just needed good food. Concerned that we might order the wrong things, we limited our choices to the recommended items—old fashioned beef satay, plaa sam rod (fried fish in sweet and sour sauce) and puu nim phat phrik Thai dum (stir-fried soft shell crab with black pepper). Every dish was a generous portion served on a large white plate, mouthwatering in appearance and especially great color. But once we started eating we understood why the place was empty: Everything was way too salty, either from too much nam plaa or too much salt—or both. We tried to make the beef satay palatable by eating it with a lot of ah jaht (cucumber and onions in vinegar), but that didn’t work. And the sweet and sour sauce on the fish couldn’t rescue it from its salty fate. Ironically, a dish that should have been salty, kung maenaam sauce noei krathiam (river prawn with butter and garlic herb sauce, was tasteless—hardly any butter taste and not a hint of garlic. When they have customers Wakamala must sell a lot of drinks, and they make delicious ones at that. (Or maybe we were just thirsty.) We can heartily recommend the apple shakes, watermelon ice blend and pineapple ice blend. When it was time for dessert, we prayed that they wouldn’t be salty. The apple tart wasn’t, but it wasn’t any good, either—bland and no apple taste. Our final hope was a dish of tab tim krob (crispy water chestnuts in coconut milk), and it was nice enough to cheer us up a bit. But unfortunately not enough to make us go back.
