Thai Riffic Randwick — Restaurant in Sydney

I don’t know what all the fuss is about over this place. It’s been here for years and is always busy, but I found the food to be bland and disappointing. Plus the toilets are awful and parking is a nightmare.

My friend and I dined on a warm Wed night in March. It was packed as usual, and hellishly noisy inside, so we sat outside on low and uncomfortable bar stools, with nowhere to hang my jacket, except to keep it on my knees. But at least we could converse and with a cool breeze blowing it was fairly pleasant and relaxed.

Despite the crowds, service was polite, super fast and efficient, and for that at least they deserve credit. Our order was quickly taken. We both chose the midweek deal, where for 29 pesos (I guess this will be 30 before long) you get an entrée, a main course, rice and a non-alcoholic drink. That’s fair value in these crazy times of Weimar Republic-style hyperinflation that this country is now experiencing, but the quality of the food justified the smallish price.

We choose the fish cakes and spring rolls for our entrees. Two small pieces each and nothing to write home about. For my main course, I chose the Massaman beef curry, my friend opted for a vegetarian dish. And two plain rice dishes to accompany. For some reason (maybe this has to do with living in a nanny state like Australia) this restaurant cannot sell alcohol to consenting adults, so we both had tea for our drinks. Would have been far nicer to have a cold beer, but nanny knows best!

My friend enjoyed his vegetarian meal, but my beef curry was horrible. Instead of the meat being cut up into fine slices, the dish consisted of three large and unwieldy pieces of dry, tough and rather tasteless meat, which I struggled to finish. And with no knife provided, just a spoon and a fork, I could hardly cut it, and the whole experience of eating it was a tedious chore. Not even the sauce helped to give it any flavour.

We paid a modest 58 pesos for all that, so I won’t complain about prices, although a year or two ago, this would probably have cost 50, which just goes to show the extent to which this government is destroying the purchasing power of our currency.

Toilets are in an outhouse behind the restaurant, in a kind of junk yard. They're dirty and unappetising. Cubicles have stable doors, with little privacy. There are no towels or even a hand dryer. It looks like maybe they get cleaned and freshened only once a day. As for parking, this is a nightmare in the Spot, even on a weeknight. After driving around for about 15 minutes we were eventually lucky to get a space outside the nearby Post Office.

Altogether an underwhelming experience and I...

Stay AWAY from this restaurant. The food is alright, but the price was EXPENSIVE. The waitresses have HORRIBLE customer service skills and could barely understand what you said. Oh, did I mention that they use the stool/ottoman that CUSTOMER sit on for STORAGE; my friend needed to stand up for the waiter to collect her personal item. Wow! The worst is it does not comply with Australian Business standard and charge you extra without confirmation.

We ordered 5 rice, and they put all the 5 bowl of rice into a medium size bowl and claimed that that was for 5 rice. I asked them to just give us individual servings of rice in a small bowl, to see if that would suffice. After the argument, one other waitress said that she will GIVE us one more bowl of rice. I thought it was because she realised that the rice of the medium bowl does not equate to 5 servings of rice. She did not say that it will be extra 1 bowl of rice. In the bill, she put in the extra bowl of rice and insisted that I should pay. I felt that my consumer right was violated. This is not the Australian way of doing business.

Please do not support this kind of shady businesses.

I would recommend It's Time for Thai in Kingsford or other Thai place on Randwick, they are much better and...

Food was fine. We ordered a variety of types of food.

We booked a table of 8 for my daughters birthday. It's the first time we have gone out since pandemic restrictions. We come in and the big space is cold. The staff are all wearing turquoise jumpers. There is a heater on the far wall.. the heater near the table is not on. It's wet and cold outside. I ask if they can turn on the heater.

The waitress says no... The heater is on (on the far wall). The other waitress turns on the closer heater. The waitress only talked back and we are the only customers. OBVIOUSLY the customer is wrong.

When it came to order. The waitress wanted to know how many rice portions to order..

This is always a pet peeve because we are not ordering take away. We are ordering curry dine in and yet we need to say how many rice we want to buy. At a Thai restaurant.

I hope I'm not the only one who thinks this is weird.

Anyway the food came so quickly literally minutes after ordering..

When we left some of our party still had on winter jackets that we kept on through our meal.

Something was just missing.

The take away / home delivery side of the business is obviously very busy.

I won't be dining in...