Banana Leaf Thai Bistro — Restaurant in Port Townsend

We visited after relaxing at "Soak on the Sound" and wanting somewhere nearby to eat dinner after 6:30pm. There was plenty of available parking, but this restaurant seemed short-staffed and stressed out. A different patron ahead of us in line was very angrily complaining about there being a 40 minute wait for food to arrive. As far as I could decipher, the staff stationed in the entrance hallway asked us whether we had a reservation to be able to dine-in, which we did not. Nothing seen before driving there had mentioned needing to make a dining reservation! However, they had several open tables that were never filled, and so that staff member pointed a finger towards an open one on the far side of the dining room and we sat ourselves. The menu had lots of tasty sounding options on it. Our appetizer, dinner, and dessert all tasted fine. The wait times all seemed normal to me, too. Two different servers came to our table throughout the dining experience and both listened attentively to our orders. Dishes were delivered individually to our table as soon as they were plated instead of together, which kept each plate extra fresh. I liked the little pieces of candy that came with our bill (it was Asian plum flavored, I think). I'd be willing to eat...

There's competition amongst the 3 Thai restaurants in PT, and admittedly, Banana Leaf is my least favorite.

I have my biases, a major one being that I'm vegetarian. So please keep that in mind. We do have friends who really like this place!

Pros:

1. They offer decent Thai food on the Olympic Peninsula
2. They offer Doordash, which is awesome and not typical for PT
3. They have a few vegetarian entrees

Major Con:

1. The veggie options are not very tasty

The Tofu steak is bland and WAY overpriced, and I've included a photo of the vegetarian curry. It includes way too many slivers of ginger, which I've pulled out in the attached pic for perspective, and there were many more that I discovered as I dug in. I love ginger, but the sticks are not awesome to chew on and overwhelm everything else. I haven't had a Thai curry that offers the same level of experience, hahaha.

So, yeah, I don't wanna throw shade on this place. We truly appreciate the veggie-friendly efforts, but the dishes are not great compared to the other 2 Thai places in town... currently. There's room for improvement as of today. :-)

I certainly encourage you to support our local business and try Banana...

We ordered the braised beef panang special and the avocado green curry with tofu based on recommendations from previous diners. The green curry was a lot sweeter than traditional versions, which is unfortunate but fairly common in Thai restaurants catering to Western palates. For the beef panang dish, the vegetables and beef cubes were in a very soupy panang curry, again sweet and missing the depth of flavor from spices that are usually present in these curries. But the weirdest thing was the beef. What is normally a soft and moist piece of meat was instead hard and salty like beef jerky. I wish I was exaggerating about the texture of this meat but it was so hard and unpleasant we stopped eating it and just ate the vegetables. We did mention it to the server after the meal when she came by with the check, and she gave us a discount on that dish. We will not be back. The only positive part of our meal was the server, a young redhead who despite having to doing everything from taking orders to serving food to ringing up the bill for what looked like the majority of the tables in the restaurant, was prompt and friendly throughout. So one more star added for the...