Rim Tanon — Restaurant in Houston

TLDR: Tom Kha soup 5/5, Pad Thai 1/5.

I had really high hopes for this place after seeing all the great reviews. I generally order pad thai (thai spicy level) every time I get thai food from a restaurant, which is about once a month while I cook my own thai curries once or twice a month. This is without a doubt, one of the worst pad thai dishes I've ever had. The only redeeming thing I can say about it is that it included the proper ingredients.

To sum it up, the pad thai is a lot of food but it is completely devoid of flavor. The noodles were very dry and it tasted like they forgot to sauce them. It's too bad they only gave me a single sliver of lime for 3 lbs of noodles because the dish absolutely needed some acidity to make those customary bright thai flavors pop, even though I'm not sure it would have helped much since there needs to be underlying flavor for the acid to actually work.

The chicken was overdone, without flavor given the lack of sauce, and cut too large probably because they boiled it before hand to save time and added it at the end rather than pan frying it made-to-order. The shrimp had tails on them which I understand is common in many asian cultures, but for me is a sign of a lazy cook considering most westerners would agree it's annoying and the tails are not edible. This pad thai is most certainly NOT authentic thai street food, and is a far cry from the amazing pad thai I had provided by a 200 lb woman sweating over an outdoor stovetop in Krabi.

The Tom Kha soup, however, was very good and I felt provided pretty solid value at $7.00. My only gripe here is that some lemon grass got left in the dish so once I took the last couple scoops I got some inedible pieces I had to spit out. I'll forgive that since it's tough to avoid and the soup was overall very good and reminded me of soup I made during a cooking class in Chiang Mai (although Rim Tanon's was admittedly better). Eating the soup before the pad thai probably exacerbated my disappointment in the pad thai since the soup was so good.

I'm extremely disappointed overall since I spent about $30 for the Tom Kha and pad thai (takeout) after tipping 10%. I strongly considered returning and demanding a refund but I was already settled in at home and the restaurant is 15 minutes away. Instead I ending up throwing away probably 2 lbs of pad thai since honestly the dish wasn't even worth the calories.

My advice to Rim Tanon would be to reduce the portions of your noodle dishes and focus more on quality and make sure that if there's one dish you get correctly in thai cuisine it's...

I have been here three times in the past and I really enjoy the food. The one thing I cannot get over is the consistently terrible service. Your servers treat their tables like they are nuisances!

Third and WORST time was coming here for our manager dinner for work. Two of us arrived first for happy hour but were waiting for the others before ordering. We finally had everyone arrive at 7:10p or so. When we asked Sunny if we could order happy hour still, she said no because we weren't ready to order before 7pm. I asked if there's no way she could make an exception since we arrived before 7pm and she just said no because we were late. I have been a server for over 5 years and have never told a guest that they can't have happy hour/lunch special/etc. without asking a manager for them first. She made no attempt and then become very short with us after this interaction. She snatched our menus up from us, put in the order, and then NEVER came back to check on us again. Other servers brought out the food (which took longer than it has in the past). My curry came out 7-10 minutes after everyone else and even though they were waiting for me to get my food before eating, I told them to just go ahead and start without me. Sunny must have told them something because the other servers didn't say a word to us when bringing us our food either. Even when we said thank you, they ignored us. Our food was spicy as it always is, but we never got offered a water refill and I had to stand up and flag a server down to get some water. Even when we finished our waters, we never got offered another refill again. I had to wave at Sunny for checks (since she never checked on us or even glanced our way the entire time) and she took her time getting the checks dropped off. Our table didn't get prebussed until after checks were delivered. I also ordered some rice to go before getting the checks, Sunny cut me off and just said "yes okay got it" and then never brought out my rice. Then after we paid out, we were waiting for the rain to stop outside. Sunny came back while we were still at the table and collected the tip slips and checks. You NEVER do this while a table is still seated and should wait until after to collect their paid out checks. You only do this when you're ready for a table to leave and are trying to rush them. Some of the other serves from previous visits were here tonight as well and dropped off food/refilled water. They never responded when we said thank you to them. Their poor service and Sunny's awful attitude made us leave with a bitter taste...

I just want to start off by saying that I have eaten Thai food at many different Thai restaurants in other states so my opinion is coming from my past personal experiences. I am visiting the city and decided to give this place a try due to proximity and the high reviews found on Google and Facebook. The ambience and decor of the restaurant was beautiful however a huge downfall to dining in on a Friday night was that yes it was a little busy but on top of that the music was extremely extremely loud. I came with a party of six people and most of them were vegetarians. To my surprise our waitress told us that they don’t make any vegetarian food because everything has meat in it and or eggs. This was a first because I have never been to a Thai restaurant that didn’t offer vegetarian options. We did settle with fried rice and some salad to accommodate for our vegetarian friends.

Only half the entrées were brought to the table. The fried rice came out about 20 minutes after the first half of the entrees came and the order was wrong because they did include eggs even though we said no meat no eggs. After that our waitress came back and asked us about the mistake with the fried rice and we explained to her that we didn’t want eggs and so long story short...we didn’t receive an apology from her and an offer to fix the problem instead we were pointed out to feel guilty about the fact that we didn’t specifically tell her no eggs even though we specified “Vegetarian no meat no eggs.” WOW.

Anywho I’ve worked in a restaurant before and customer service is key to ensure your customers are happy and satisfied of which we received none of that. We don’t plan on coming back and I don’t think this place deserves the high review it...