Royal Thai Restaurant — Restaurant in Adelaide

I love Thai food, we eat it out and we cook it at home.

We've just left this restaurant and it was the WORST 'Thai food' we have ever had. It steadily became aware to us that it's Chinese cooking Thai food and not Thai's. I have nothing against Chinese people cooking Thai food, but this food had too many 'Chinese'isms' To be authentic Thai. Please let me explain:

Thai food is famous for dishes of fresh vegetables and meats and 95% of it is cooked fresh to order; rarely do they pre cook before opening.

We first noticed on the menu that vegetables can be a separate order which isn't usually a Thai thing. When the dishes arrived dishes we have ordered for years, that we know and love; they came 'strange'.

The green papaya salad was off the chart sour. It had 3 fresh prawns on top not the regular tiny dried salty shrimps that charge the whole dish with flavour. I have to say, fresh prawns on a salad isn't cheap so it says they were going higher than the lower cost tiny dried shrimps, but without those tiny shrimps 1/10 for flavour. Green papaya salad also has peanuts and fresh green beans; this one didn't. We like our Papaya salad spicy so we asked for our regular 3 extra chillies than normal (20 years of this request in Thai restaurants and they always mix in extra fresh chillies) ..it arrived with zero chillies in the salad and dried chilli flakes on top. ..flakes that take hours to rehydrate to get anything out of. So yeah.. dry flakes of zero heat on the salad. The worse Papaya salad we've ever had.

I usually get Penang chicken and as Penang beef was on the menu I requested if I could get a Penang Chicken. As Thai's cook everything fresh, in the past, at other restaurants such a request has had zero issues as it doesn't matter to them which meat is put in the dish. They couldn't do a chicken Penang?..so I take it they have cooked the Penang before opening?? As said before, not really a Thai way of doing things.

I ordered the Yellow Chicken Curry.

Ordering the food we told them of my onion allergy, they obliged. 20 mins after our order was placed they came and told us that I couldn't have the Yellow Chicken Curry because it had onions in it. ..why were we told this so long after the order was placed?

The entrée (papaya salad) arrived 5 mins before the mains, not good. The mains arrived as plates stacked full of chicken and sauce. ..no vegetables ..??

If you love chicken your eyes would light up to the giant stack of chicken (I use the term 'Chicken' loosely, more about that later). The stack was humongous in size ..but no vegetables ??

The sauces of both the main courses were of good quality, we started eating and it soon became apparent that the chicken was.. Hmm.. something between chicken and science. Don't get me wrong, Thai restaurants use a lower quality chicken than say what you buy in the supermarket but the chicken here seemed to be a few steps further down on the grading scale. It's hard to describe: springy, gelatinous, over processed, strange textured ..are the closest words I can use, but they don't really explain it, no words can. Your run of the mill hole in the wall Thai or Indian take away has better quality chicken in its dishes than this place does.

We were unable to finish either of the Mains. We left about 40% of each one on the plate. The sauce was helping with the 'chicken' texture but it only made it palatable for so long, we gave up, paid the bill and left to never return.

Cleanliness: 5 star Service: 4.5 stars (minus a half star because of the late information about not being able to have a dish; they were super friendly though) Food Authenticity (of what we ordered) 3...

We called and asked if they could do a few dishes vegan (no fish sauce or egg) hardly anything could be done without fish sauce, even though it was on the vegetarian section but they assured us we could have some dishes.

We ordered a "Pad Thai" and salt and pepper tofu after much confusion on the phone. The person on the phone assured us the salt and pepper tofu had no fish sauce and was vegan.

When opening up our order we found salt and pepper chicken, NOT tofu. Not what we ordered, and we don't eat meat. The pad thai had no tofu, peanuts, chilli/lemon or any vegetables apart from bean sprouts and some greens and the sauce was really plain in flavour. Just a pile of noodles with no flavour, very...

Thai Restaurant that's not Thai its Chinese the food especially Green Chicken Curry Prawns Choo Chee both dishes could not be eaten they were absolutely disgusting .Pad Thai noodles made with absolutely no love and covered in Tomato sauce also could not eat. When challenged that their food was well below acceptable standards we were just brushed off like it was our fault for eating there in a chinese restaurant but it says Thai on the door. Do yourself a big favour and do not lower yourself, Adelaide has so many great restaurants this is definitely not...