Soi 3 Thai Street Food — Restaurant in Kennesaw

For those looking to skip reading a lengthy review, let me hit you with the highlights up front. The restaurant has a wonderful, clean, modern aesthetic and the food was absolutely fantastic. A+ 10/10. One of our new favorite restaurants in Kennesaw. It's not a traditional "thai restaurant" that Americans will be familiar with - it's definitely got some unique menu items. Recommendations: #17: Khao Soi Gai, which is a super creamy curry soup with noodles and chicken breast. It's a little spicy, but the flavors are out of this world. #18: Pad Krapow Gai (we subsituted pork for chicken) - extremely flavorful minced meat over rice, bursting with seasonings. If you're looking for 2 things, look no further. #17 and 18, done.

(Lana - You were a fantastic server and we thank you so much for the recommendations!)

The rest of my review is more aimed at the owners, because you are sitting on a potential home run of a restaurant, and I will be so sad if this place closes. Your food is too freaking good to have an empty restaurant.

#1, and let me emphasize this with fireworks and strobe lights. Your menu needs to be completely redone! It's truly the #1 thing holding you back. While it's trendy to do a single-page menu that's straight to the point, it's easier said than done when you're dealing with a majority of dishes most people won't have heard of. I can't emphasize this enough: take a note from Firestone Chinese which is just down the street and embrace a menu with lots of pictures. Literally, go to their restaurant and look at their menu. Instead of a paragraph of text and ingredients, your food do the talking. It's been echoed on Yelp, and was the prime thing my wife and I experienced after sitting down - we had no idea what we were looking at. Every dish was brand new, so we're just going down the list looking at the various ingredients in everything without an idea of what to actually get. Our server Lana is who recommend #17 and #18, so we blindly trusted her and thankfully we did. A lot of people will look up the menu of a restaurant before going. Had we done that, we'd honestly probably have skipped going because nothing stood out as a must try because we didn't know what anything was. Fast forward to when Lana put our meals down on our table and we were shocked at how amazing the dishes looked. I'm telling you, do yourself a massive favor. Make a new menu, use lots of high quality colorful pictures, and get people excited to order items rather than feeling confused! It'll not only get people comfortable in the store, it'll make someone looking at your menu online decide to go rather than feeling intimidated and going elsewhere.

This is a dumb complaint, but the fact your #21 pad Thai comes with lobster tail for $24 or no meat for $12 are too ends of a weird spectrum that make no sense. We were allowed to pay $1 more for pork instead of chicken on our #18 meal with no questions, but were told we couldn't pay to add chicken or pork to the #21. No good. Lobster tail is a cool touch, but you need to scale back the price point and offer another option with it.

The Thai Iced Tea serving is really small, given the price and no refills. If refills aren't going to be offered, at least make the serving larger. This was the only part of the meal we thought was disappointing, and won't order again, as it didn't nearly feel like we got our money's worth.

Music! Sitting in a restaurant by yourselves with no music can feel off putting. Thankfully we had our own moans and groans of "oh my god this food is so amazing" to listen to, but that wouldn't be great listening material for anyone else.

And that's literally it. Redo your menu with pictures, turn on some music, offer a version of your pad thai with something other than lobster tail and either offer refills on your Thai Iced Tea or make the serving size larger and you've got yourself an absolute grand slam of a restaurant on your hands. Can't wait to come back soon and try more new things - HOPEFULLY ON A MENU...

I'll give 2 stars instead of 1 because while it was a bad experience, the food seemed to be high-quality, even if I could barely eat it because of the spice level.

For starters, everything on their menu is spicy. The wait staff tells you that up front, along with the full history of the restaurant and many other things across numerous inescapable conversations while you eat. This is not a place to have a relaxing quiet meal with a friend or spouse. Expect not to be able to have a conversation amongst yourselves, due to frequent interruptions from the very talkative folks from all parts of the restaurant: multiple different waiters and the chef all occupied about 40 minutes out of the just-under-an-hour we spent there in conversations we couldn't seem to politely escape. At all times, someone who'd trapped us in long conversations was no further than 6 feet from our table. I'm from the south, I'm used to friendly conversation. But if I'm paying over $50 for a meal out on Friday night with my wife, I would like the opportunity to actually talk with my wife at some point without getting the high-pressure-sales approach. The experience is like being followed around a furniture store by a salesman. You get paranoid about accidentally making eye contact, and relaxed conversation with your own party is impossible. Since there are no booths, only high metal stools and metal benches, there is also no privacy. But I doubt booths would be enough to give you any privacy based on our experience.

If you have time to read the full menu, you're luckier than we were (we had to ask for time to read the menu 4 times across an almost-10-minute window). But if so, you may notice on the menu something the wait staff will also tell you: part of the menu is "shareables" and part is entrees, and you "typically order 1-2 plates per person". It's not super clear which are which, but we managed to order an entree each and 1 appetizer, and it was far more than we needed. Had we just ordered an entree, we would have had enough food for us both without paying over $50 for a 2-person meal.

This is in part because, for example, if you order curry, rice is an extra $3. In fact, rice is always an extra $3, and they'll recommend you order rice with everything, even the appetizers. The purple rice is a decent-sized portion, slightly smaller than you'd get from any other Thai restaurant with your meal. The sticky rice is about 2 tablespoons of rice. Both cost the same, so avoid the sticky rice if you want to get your money's worth.

Ultimately, it wound up being good that we ordered the appetizer, though, because it's one of the 4 or 5 items on their long menu that can be made milder. And it was actually mild enough to eat, unlike the green curry I ordered, which one of the talkative waiters later explained was made from serrano peppers. That would've been nice to know from the menu, but that detail was absent -- or perhaps tucked in a corner I didn't have time to read. There's a lot to take in on the menu, and not enough time to read it due to the frequent unwanted sales pitches from wait staff.

Ultimately, my wife, who has a very high spice tolerance, was able to enjoy my meal, and her impression was that it was well-prepared, so it wasn't a total loss in that regard. Still, I would have liked to have been able to eat the expensive food I ordered.

If you're savvy, and willing to be rude, and have a very high tolerance for spicy food, you can probably get away with a meal that's nearly enjoyable. But when there are better options for Thai food in the area, why put yourself through the hurdles of trying to make this place into a...

Sad, sad food. We came to celebrate two birthdays. We pulled up expecting Fuji Hana only to realize they were no longer there. But the word “Thai” alluded to an evening of hope, albeit fleeting. There were many red flags we ignored that should have been heeded. One, the parking lot was empty. There were maybe four other tables occupied in the whole place. Entire bar was empty.

The first sight when we entered was nice, though. It looked very fancy. That ended when we stepped further in and saw the uncomfortable seating. They state street-food, which made sense for that decor but it looked more fitting in an Americanized taqueria like Moe’s than a casual Thai place. Coupled with the polished, live edge wooden tables, it just looked slapped together without the right thought. Confusing, especially the dining options.

The menu lacked the popular and favorite dishes we all love about Thai. The layout was not helpful. No pictures. Too much unknown and new without any of the tried and true. Plus, street food around the world is meant to be quick, light bites. You eat it as you’re out and about. When you try and incorporate that into a sit-down restaurant with large portions, it becomes overwhelming. Some dishes were really heavy for that style. Others were so blindingly spicy that you couldn’t taste much else. Even without the heat, they lacked the layered, complex flavors so characteristic of this cuisine. Other dishes, like the broth in the soups, were flat and flavorless. The Thai tea was overwhelmingly sweet and lacked the proper tanin to sweetness ratio that makes this beverage memorable.

The server we got, however, was one of the most attentive and helpful waiters I’ve ever had. I wish I could remember his name but he had a black wedding band and long hair, I believe. His favorite dish had recently been changed to #18. He was very knowledgeable. (Side note, always tip your server well even if the food isn’t to your liking. They try their best.)

Also, they have no shrimp options 😭😭😭.

We really, really wanted to enjoy this but were so...