Silk Elephant — Restaurant in Pittsburgh

April 2020

I have frequented Silk Elephant for about two years. The visit today put me a little off. I had ordered two of their famous Thai fried rice dishes.

I adore the diversity of their menu and flexibility of the chef for vegetarian options. They are almost always true to the spice scale.

For vegetarians, you must try their vegetable dumplings and corn fritters in appetizers. Thai basil fried rice is my personal favorite rice dish.

My friend is apathetic to Mushroom, so I had specifically mentioned no mushrooms in any of the two dishes. However, we found mushrooms in ample amount when we opened the take out at home.

I understand that sometimes specific instructions are lost before they reach the chef. It happened for the first time since we dined with them. I picked up the phone and called them to see if they can cook it again for us. They asked us to bring the dish and we were fine with it. However, I was surprised that they did not have the dish ready when I arrived. Also, the returned dish made it way back to the kitchen area. In less than 5 minutes, I received the rice back and I could still smell mushroom in the rice and we, in fact, found tiny pieces of left over mushrooms in it.

It was likely that they had just physically removed mushrooms and warmed it up before repacking it for us.

They got it right so many times in the past and it is okay to get it wrong once. They deserved my patience to make another trip and cook it again but they lost my trust by pulling...

Got a chance to enjoy their food Monday night and I'm back again Wednesday! Meant to write a review for the night I came in because I had ordered so last minute but they still helped me! Thank God! Couple things I noticed. This was my 1st time being there and everyone seemed very happy! And this is last 20 minutes of them closing and I would have thought they just opened with how pleasant the staff was. Nobody seemed tired, everybody said hi to me and made me feel extremly comfortable. If I weren't a beautifully made woman myself it would be weird to say, but it was pleasant being surrounded by beautiful woman that where happy lol. So obviously the environment was great! I would bring my kids here if they did dine in which I'm not sure of. Being racially ambiguous, that's a great feeling to have, as you dont know what you'll get when you step into society and i dont want to adhere my children to the white gaze to often. I just did delivery this time, they arent more then 15 min from home. The driver is 3rd party and seems to be on time since they just called. oh yeah so main reason I'm writing this...order the mussels!!!!!!!!! omg they where sooooooooo fresh and very very very good. The sauce was like no other, honestly. Mussels where amazing and we also got lamb curry if nobody knows lamb is always the way to go and their curry is very very good and has pineapples as well, so it is great for the kids if they need the hint of sweetness, in a...

Great Thai food! There are loads of Thai options around Pittsburgh, and tons of Asian food in Squirrel Hill. This place has some really interesting and unique options as well as a diverse menu. I decided to stick to my go-tos. Ordered the pad Thai (mild spice) with extra sauce and tofu as well as the Thai custard with coconut sweet sticky rice.

Wow, they give you a huge portion of noodles for pad Thai! And it's very tasty as well. I asked them for some extra sauce so it wouldn't be dry, and they did not disappoint. This was a satisfying amount of sauce. Also, they gave me lots of peanuts (much more than most places) and perfectly followed some of the other instructions for my order. And, they added in large chunks of fried tofu. It was decently well soaked in the sauce and pretty tasty. Decent amount of eggs and bean sprouts. Overall, quite good.

The Thai custard was also quite tasty. The custard itself was absolutely excellent. Good portion, perfect balance of sweetness, not too eggy, just a great treat. The rice was sticky and decent. Oddly, there were kernels of black rice in it (I've not seen this before in Thai sticky rice). There wasn't quite enough coconut topping/sweet milk.

All in all, a very solid option for Thai food in Squirrel Hill. I definitely prefer their pad Thai over Thai and Noodle Outlet. Portions are quite large, prices decent. They have loads of unique tapas options, like corn cakes, mussels, and more....