Oakland seems to have a lot of Lao style restaurants and from the lot, Chai Thai Noodles, up until last year, used to be one of my favorite restaurants for noodle soups. It is located next to a park that hosts a homeless encampment so it’s not the safest place to be hanging out at least around their closing time. Over a period of time I’ve tried the Kao Poon (red coconut curry soup, rice noodles, chicken, cabbage and bean sprouts), Kao Soy Thai (yellow noodles topped with yellow curry soup and chicken), Chicken Noodle soup (chicken soup with chicken and noodles) and the Beef Noodle soup. What I really liked was they were able to cook the noodles in such a way that they would not clump-up by the time you reached home and that the soup was a tasty thick curry. My absolute favorite was the Kao Poon. It was like almost eating noodles with a curry dish.

Unfortunately something changed and this year the quality seems to have gone significantly downhill. I got the Kao Soy Thai a couple of days back and noticed a couple of differences. The box used to hold the noodles has shrunk to half the size of what it was earlier. As expected the noodles had all clumped together by the time I reached home. They had also simply dumped the crispy noodles on top of the cooked yellow noodles (rather than providing it separately) causing them to absorb all the moisture from the noodles and become soft. The soup was also pretty diluted and you could actually see two different layers in the soup container that needed to be stirred together. Goes without saying I was not happy with what I got.

Most of the Noodle soups are around the $10 mark so it’s pretty cheap (I think this year some have gone up by a couple of bucks, but it’s still pretty cheap). Unfortunately the drop in quality this year has given me reason to look for another place for my noodle soup fix. I may come back and try some of their curries and rice dishes but I’m not inclined to return for the noodle soups any more. I’m averaging out an almost 5 star rating for last year with a solid 2 star rating for this year and settling on an A-OK grade.