Did I Order Pad Thai or Lo Mein?

Our little lunch group in the office has expanded from our usual cheap lunch spots – Subway and street carts – and recently began ordering in at least once a week.  Recently, we were attracted to the Thai restaurant Jaiya, because of the lunch specials.

Located in Murray Hill and Long Island City, Jaiya offers a lunch special where you get a choice of appetizer with each entree.  Appetizers include salads, soup and spring roll.  On this particular day, I went with the spring roll.  The plum sauce, although greasy tasting, made the spring roll taste much better.  While I understand there were mushrooms in the spring roll, the taste overpowered the roll.  Egg rolls and spring rolls are my favorite part of Asian dishes and I was very disappointed.

On to the chicken pad thai – because as you know by now, that’s always what I order.  One of the reasons I love Thai so much is that it’s not nearly as greasy as say, Chinese.  This chicken pad thai however was so greasy, that I could easily have mistaken it for lo mein.  Now, I wouldn’t have mistaken it for chicken lo mein because frankly, there was very little chicken in it.  The dish tasted bland, and if I was home and eating this dish, rather than a conference room, I would have been microwaving it with peanut butter on top.  Everyone around who ordered the pad thai shared similar thoughts and since the dish was greasy already, my co-worker Paul mentioned he dumped the plum sauce from the spring roll on top to add some flavor.

While some of us felt the dish needed flavor, others were hoping their dishes could go easy on the spice.  Our blog designer McKenna ordered the thai basil dish and said there was no flavor on the dish – just an overpowering of hot spices.  Needless to say, she looked miserable during lunch.  With plenty of Thai places out there, Jaiya won’t be on my list to ever return to.