Sukhothai Restaurant — Restaurant in Bellevue

Let it be known that I have ordered from Sukothai many times. Their food is good, and their restaurant is quite nice on the inside. However, I just had to misfortune of trying to order take out over the phone, Friday, July 31st, 2020.

There was a woman who answered the phone. I asked to place an order. She then told me to "hold one moment please", and set the phone down while she walked to the back of the restaurant. I could hear her faintly, talking, doing whatever it was she was doing. After 5 minutes on hold, I was hung up on. I thought, "hmm, that's odd, maybe something happened."

I tried calling back, there was no answering machine. They had disconnected their phone (phone disconnect sound played). Now I was curious, "Did they really just disconnect their phone because they didn't want to take any orders Friday night?". So naturally, I called back, at this point I was much too curious to let it go. Still, phone was disconnected.

But with the 5th call, we got through again (~10min later). Same woman answered the phone. I repeated "I'd like to place an order", and again I was met with "Hold one moment please."

Now this is where I knew for sure it was no accident.

This 2nd time around, she left me on hold for 20 MINUTES, till their closing time. At which point I assumed she would probably disconnect me again. I would have love to see the conclusion of this fine event, but my wife was hungry, so we ended up ordering from a different location (she placed the entire order while I was on hold).

7 calls total, 2 of which I was put on hold. The first for 5 minutes before being hung up on, the second for 20+ minutes. The other 5 they had their phone disconnected.

Now I don't understand why, or what would compel someone to do this, when they could have easily just told me they weren't taking any more orders than night, and saved us both a lot of time.

I'm giving two stars because I do enjoy their food, but the behavior I experienced today is absolutely unacceptable, and will surly destroy their business if...

An average Thai place compared to surrounding cities, maybe it's one of the better ones in Bellevue but comparing to Washington as a whole, it wasn't anything special. This doesn't mean it was bad at all, food was tasty and service was solid, but there was nothing surprising to put Sukho Thai higher.

Prices reflect no meat (comes with tofu) and you can substitute tofu with chicken or pork for an extra dollar, or other meats for more. Price is already higher than others at $15 without meat included, but it is the Bellevue area to be fair. Portion wasn't noticeably larger than other places such as in Seattle, the U-District, etc while being $4 more with chicken.

Pad thai and pad see-ew were standard, but I appreciate that they aren't drenched in sauce. No lime is provided though, so you can't squeeze to taste depending on your preferences and that was one con. The plates aren't the best for mixing your food (they're long and horizontal so food can fall on the short end). I'm more used to standard, circular plates which allow me to mix everything very well. This eater experience isn't the best but it's by no means terrible, you can still mix but you'll just require more effort if you want to avoid dropping food on the table.

Unfortunately they sold out of the summer rolls on our visit but we were also astonished that these so called appetizers cost just about the same as an entree (roughly $12 appetizer, $14 entree).

Service was solid and attentive. Water was refilled, other customers were served, takeout orders were helped. Interior is definitely clean, saw the sole staff working cleaning up not just the table but taking care of the floor. For the service, I'm inclined to bump up a rating but it didn't impact us enough to...

I normally get the traditional dishes like Pad Thai or Pad Ki Mao at Thai restaurants, so I was interested to try the Crispy Garlic Prawns out The batter on the prawns (shrimp) was pretty decent - although it wasn't really crispy like the name suggested, it was a little bit crunchy and you could tell the sauce was definitely there. The fact that these were also coated in oil was pretty nice. On the inside, I thought the prawns were cooked well - they remained pretty soft and didn't appear overcooked

I did feel like the spice was pretty much missing, though. I ordered 4/5 stars, but it tasted more like 1/5 stars as there was a pretty significant lack of spice that took away from a lot of the flavor potential. Speaking of the missing flavor, there should've been a lot more sauce added to this dish - either poured on top of the prawns or the prawns come sitting in it. The benefit of this is that it you can mix everything with the rice - and this sauce coats the rice to make it taste good. The way it's currently presented, the prawns are too large to really eat with the rice, and mixing the two will just result in eating the meat and taking another bite of plain rice because there isn't enough sauce to coat the rice. This dish just ended up being eating the prawns by themselves - the rice wasn't super useful As a result, after finishing I really wasn't that full

For the price (around 20 ish) there are a good amount of prawns, but I wouldn't really say you're getting a good deal here

Overall, the taste of the individual items was good, but the experience could've been...