Benjarong Thai Restaurant — Restaurant in Monroe

My husband and I visited this restaurant for our first time tonight - it was great!

The best part was the service. The server was a very sweet young woman who did a great job. She checked on us frequently and our baby loved her (they provided us a high chair). The whole staff were very kind - we started to clean up the mess our baby made and they said they'll take care of it. One of the ladies had stopped by to say hi to the baby, we learned she has a 5 month old granddaughter. Coming from nearby small town Duvall, we absolutely love the family and small business feel. The atmosphere was family friendly - we went pretty early for dinner and there were other families with children there. There wasn't loud music playing, very easy to talk to each other.

I loved the Thai iced tea - it's a huge serving and I didn't need a second glass. I had the sizzling seafood basket. They must have slightly outdated menus because it did not arrive on a sizzling plate, but that's fine. The noodles soaked up most of the spices so to me the veggies and seafood tasted like there was no spice on them - not a problem to take a piece of each in a bite though. Love that they offer brown rice to replace white rice at no surcharge. Food was cooked very well - piping hot and the veggies like the onions, carrots, and ginger were definitely fresh. The seafood was not overcooked/chewy. We ordered kids chicken pad Thai for my baby. It was quite a portion! It automatically comes no spicy so to my husband and I it was very sweet, but I could see kids loving it. My husband ordered the holy basil with prawns. Will warn people that the tails are still on, for those that can't stand having to peel them off. He ate every last piece and loved it. He got 3* spicy and said he could have gotten it spicier.

One thing that really stood out to me was how they garnish the dishes. I thought they were beautiful. Like the pad Thai had fresh beans sprouts, shaved carrots & purple cabbage - it really gave a good pop of color.

My only negative feedback is we ordered the crab delight and it was 15% too salty. Not so salty we couldn't eat it, but definitely hits the tongue and we needed to drink water after eating it.

Would definitely come back...

I am really sad to write this review so low. I have been going to this establishment for many many years. It has always had great food and exceptional service. My most recent visit was very bad for me and my GF. We got seated and our server who has been my server many many times had his phone earbuds in. We decided what to order and put in our order. We asked for 2 Thai iced teas and two entrees. One of our entrees showed up very quickly and before we got our iced teas. I mentioned loudly that we got our first entree before our teas. We were basically ignored because our server was on his phone with the ear buds in. The 2nd entree arrived well after the first and still no iced teas. We got Phad Thai with chicken and Golden Cashew with chicken. The food was ok not great like I was used to be. The Phad Thai was way too sweet. The Golden Cashew was very good. We had to ask for a water refill with empty glasses sitting on the end of the table and there were probably 2 other tables in the whole restaurant at the time. When we finished our meal we spent a while trying to get someone's attention to pay the bill. I finally had to resort to literally holding my card in the air to get someone to notice. The server that was not our original server just grabbed my card out of the air and went up and rang us out. When the bill showed up it had the 2 iced teas that we never got still on it. I asked for it to be removed. The server went back and refunded the whole meal to my card. When the receipts were returned the server literally tossed the new bill and returned receipts on the table and walked away with no explanation. It was extremely rude. There was some confusion about what we need to do next. When we got our servers attention they came over hardly listening to our questions and grabbed the paperwork and went to the register to "remove" the iced teas that had already been removed from the bill. Our server was still with the phone earbuds and basically paid no attention to us. We finally got settled up and paid our bill. It is very unlikely I will ever return and as many years as I've been coming here it's really sad to me how terribly I feel I was treated...

Ok so here goes. I don’t eat out often so when I do I consider it a treat. Tonight I decided to take my mom out for a treat for dinner. We both worked hard on house chores so we “deserved it”. We chose Thai food and we wanted to stay local. The yelp hoots looked good so we wanted to give this spot a try. I ordered an IPA. I asked for a splash of OJ in my beer. Strike 1 they said they couldn’t do that. I imagined it was because they didn’t have orange juice on tap. They said they did have orange juice, but I would have to order an entire order of orange juice which at that point I said OK oh well sure I’ll take an order of orange juice. I figured id just pour some bottle juice into my beer. To my surprise, I did get my IPA beer and I also got my full-size orange juice which was poured in a normal glass and it was just orange juice from concentrate. Whack, they could have easily accommodated my request for a brass monkey beer. OK whatever. Strike two is we ordered several plates to share and we asked for no spice on any plate because my mother has a severe low tolerance for spice. When the fried rice came, it was noticeably spicy to my mother, she could not eat it so we were going to attempt to return it at which point the owner was ready to come back and tell us absolutely not and we just had to deal with it. I didn’t want to start any problems so I decided to just keep the plate to de-escalate, but we had to sacrifice our dinner and my mother was not able to fulfill her appetite. I will note that the soup we ordered was delicious and the garlic pork ribs were delicious. The reason for my rating is because the staff is absolutely disconnected from customer service and not tuned into the customer...