Thai Lanna — Restaurant in Denver

Ideal date? We go get Thai food. I eat a 1/3 of the meal. You are very impressed I eat that much and my spice level choice does not scare you. Unexpected finds are always a pleasure for me.

Was downtown and wanting something different from the bar scene and usual steakhouses I wander into often. Thai Lanna is within the 16th Street Mall around several eateries. Parking is as brave as you want to be about parallel spaces. Metered parking is a lot closer than the parking garages.

It's downstairs when you walk in from the street level of the mall. Unpretentious and just authentic Thai service and food. Service is naturally friendly and unobstrusive even with her being the only server working on a Saturday evening. We ordered the papaya salad (which would be super elevated if they offered salted crab) but was good. Ordered level 3 but suggest 4 if you want it more spicy. We also had the Tom Yum soup with shrimp as level 3. Cannot gush enough about how amazing they married the lemongrass and tamarind flavors together. My all time go to is the red curry because I love bamboo shoots. Level 3 on this is perfect spice level for us calientes and the adventures wimps. It's one star short because during the winter she doesn't serve the mango sticky rice because it is not as fresh and in season. My return visit will be expecting sampling of all the desserts.

While there are plenty of Thai spots around the Denver metro area, the sauce won't taste the same as Thai Lanna. They feed your soul inside and out with smiles and good food. Three places always that are my go to spots: airports, coffee shops and any...

There is a sort of universal dish called pad Thai that is a standardized feature of Thai cuisine. But there is a runner up. A dish that Thai folk love that is vastly underrepresented in Americanized Thai that is pad kra pow (yes,there are a dozen different spelling of this). My local Thai restaurants (Orlando,fl) didn’t offer the dish despite my best searches for a year.

Then, like a revelation, on our trip to Denver, we selected a Thai restaurant for a travel fatigued meal, we found this perfect grotto of Thai cuisine. We had settled on a conventional set of dishes and cast aside the menu, when lo and behold on the back of the menu we saw pad kra pow. In thrilled anticipation I ordered it and waited. Would this be as thrilling as expected or yet another culinary let-down? The answer is, it was fantastic!11!! A slightly spicier than expected but absolutely delicious meal appeared before me. I simply do not have adequate words. It is delicious on so many levels. Crumbled,ground beef (or chicken or pork) with sharp Thai spices, mixed with red and green peppers and green beans. And a fried egg on top. And a side of rice as a simple stabilizing agent in the otherwise spicy-savory-hot-tangy meal was absolutely amazing. There is an interplay of egg yolk, spicy beef, and overall textures that cannot be denied!

Let’s be honest here. Some people like simple food. ‘I’m a beef and potato’s guy’” is treated as some sort of badge of honor. But I’m not that guy and if you read this far, then neither are you.

Pad Kara pow is a revelation and you owe it to yourself to give it a try! Treat...

We ordered delivery from Thai Lanna last week. The online service was super simple, the texts prompt. The service super fast: much less than the estimated time. Perhaps this was a perk of it being only a Thursday night?

The food was fresh and hot, but the flavor was only ok. The chicken Satay was good, but bland. The peanut sauce was super peanut-buttery: not enough other flavor. Whatever the little cucumber salad cup was tasted good to me, though the sweet vinegar taste isn't for everyone. The Massaman curry seemed watery and had large chunks of carrot, which we hadn't seen before (not bad necessarily, just different). The drunken noodles tasted good, but had almost no spice, despite being listed in the menu as spicy (I get they tame it down, that's fine, but I am not a super-spice type person and even I thought it was mild.) They also just lacked a richness I have tasted elsewhere. The fried wontons were not a crispy envelope stuffed with chicken: they had less than a teaspoon of chicken inside, so little that the first one I ate I thought they had just left out the meat entirely. The wontons were also just folded in half. It was more like eating Asian chips and dip with the sweet chili sauce that came with them. Definitely not worth nearly $8 just for those.

Overall, the prices were average to slightly high for what you get, the food fine, but uninspiring. Maybe if we had been less exhausted and gone in person we could have requested it spicier, but oh well. Three...