Thanh Thao Restaurant — Restaurant in Seattle

Update for April 2022: The menu is now very limited and the prices are high. We paid $60 for dinner - two rice plates, two summer rolls, and one iced coffee (no more Thai iced tea and they were stingy with the condensed milk in the coffee). Used to be packed all the time but tonight there were a lot of empty tables. Too bad. This used to be a great place but I doubt we'll be back.

It's a little hole in the wall storefront in an Asian mall anchored by Island Pacific, the California-based Filipino supermarket. I love the big Chinese restaurant a few doors up, but Thanh Thao is a great place, too. The menu has 200+ Viet and Thai items. We mostly go there for the Viet dishes. The beef jerky salad is to die for -- the shoyu dressing is perfect. They have a couple of reasonably priced combo meals too. All in all you can get a nice meal for under $15 including a 20% tip. But if you don't understand Asian restaurants (the real kind where Asian people eat), don't go here. There are boxes of supplies and food products stacked up by the desk and in the hallway and a couple of chest freezers in the dining room. And the wait staff is friendly (if you are) and efficient, but they don't hover, which seems to be what rich people expect from wait staff. Just a nice neighborhood place for ordinary people to get...

first off.The food made me violently ill. Second the service or lack of is non existent it took me over 1/2 hour for waitress to even notice i was waiting which was strange since she was the one that showed me to my Seat. Which was a horrible arrangement btw.i was cramped up between a bunch of other folks which were yelling back and forth in their native language. Waitress was chatting with them the entire time while i was waiting for about 15 min. Now then a group of customers walked in they got seated she took their order keep in mind im still waiting . some other person employee came out with a plates of food and guess who got served the people that came in after me and when she finally decided to help i couldnt hardly understand her the order was incorrect. At this point i was so angry i didnt care i just got whatever to go and boy it was possibly the worst tasting stuff ever (did they just get scraps from garbage?) anyhow i tossed it few hours later like i mentioned earlier . food poisoning! i wouldnt reccomend this place to anyone not even to my boss. And...

I have been here twice, the first time it was really good, service was good, food was good and it was a great experience. The second time was less so, we were seated and the server brought tea to the table and brought waters out after the food came out, the first time I ordered seafood chow mein and it was very flavorful, they left the tails on the shrimp which isn’t surprising. The second time I got the seafood chow mein again and the shrimp tails were removed this time and the shrimp were cut in half, I also got shrimp fried rice and it was bland and not even fried. It was like white rice with mixed vegetables that you find in a frozen section of a grocery store, it was very underwhelming. I also got a Chinese doughnut and it was cold, when I asked my server she said they fry a bunch at the beginning of service and hold them, they open at 10am and stay open until 10pm, I came in at 8:45pm, that doughnut was so gross. The first experience was excellent but the second experience makes me not want to...