Kiao Wan Thai — Restaurant in South Hadley

I ordered takeout from Kiao Wan on a Thursday night as a treat for my parents and I. We all love Thai food, and take any chance we can to eat it, but haven’t found a restaurant we love since moving to the Pioneer Valley. We were all excited and looked forward to a delicious dinner. Little did we know what we were in for!

The problems with Kiao Wan began in the ordering process. I called the restaurant to place an order by phone because their online ordering service was not working. I ordered a pad thai with chicken and then asked for fresh spring rolls with shrimp added, which is very traditional. I was told by the person on the phone that they can’t add shrimp because the rolls are “premade.” This was a bit of a red flag, but I assumed it was just something restaurants do to ensure timely prep of food. Almost all of the other dishes I asked to order were either already sold out or had been “taken off the menu.” This included both grilled meat options, pad see ew and both the penang and red curries. Eventually I settled on ordering a yellow curry, a green curry and a massaman curry.

I was told that the wait time for food would be an hour, but I drove to the restaurant early so that I could check out the vibe and get my food when it was still hot. Because of this I was surprised that it was already prepared and sitting when I got there after twenty minutes! The workers are nice and the interior of the restaurant is ok.

Now for the food. The curries were probably the most bland I have had in my life! The best way to characterize them is as big vats of coconut milk, each with different curry pastes and chopped up raw veggies and tofu thrown into them before heated up in the microwave for two minutes. Also, the massaman curry has cashews in it (not typical), which was not listed on the menu and should really be advertised. My mother is allergic to cashews, but not peanuts, and had my dad not noticed that there were cashews in the curry before she took a bite, she probably would have ended up in the hospital.

The spring rolls were old and wilted, falling apart and mushy when we took them out of the container. As for the peanut sauce, we joked that it was probably Skippy peanut butter mixed with soy sauce.

The pad thai was the worst item. Dry, lacking in flavor and made with old noodles that had gotten gummy and coagulated like old gluten free pasta. There were probably three small pieces of chicken in it. Disgustingly, when we looked at the noodles closely we could see that there was black grit in them that looked like dirt.

Kiao Wan Thai is nothing like what it bills itself as, not fresh, not delicious and certainly not authentic. It is the same mediocre college food that you find all over America and that you can’t help feeling is somewhat predatory. Trust me, you can get better Thai food in less time and for less money by heating up Trader Joe’s. I am actually so upset that I wasted seventy dollars on a dinner prepared with so little thought or care. Don’t make the same mistake I did,...

March 16, 2025 Evening. After attending an amazing concert at Mount Holyoke in the Abbe Chapel with the South Hadley Chorale playing Bach and Durante, my wife and I found this little place, Kiao Wan Thai Restaurant, a diamond in the rough. I know this location has changed numerous restaurants over the years but this one should stay. We went in to look at the choices and prices. All reasonable. I traveled many years ago to Thailand and I can assure you, it's authentic. Better than the Blue Elephant in Springfield. We ordered the 3 curries and what came out was a bowl of soup but it wasn't soup it was filled with chunks of meat and other veggies inside. You pour it over the white rice and then dig in. It was so good and each one was so different. The workers in the kitchen area were hard working and conscientious. I noticed someone in the kitchen looked like the boss and all the photos in the restaurant, she was in the photos. I was so happy when she came over to talk with us 3 waiting patiently for our main dish. The Spring Rolls were amazing and I've had a few in my life. June came over and was so friendly. But the best way to describe her was a multi-lingual, Red Sox Fan, Wonder Woman. She speaks practically every language, spoke Mandarin and Cantonese, also speaks German, Italian and a bit of Arabic! Amazing! The curries came out and we just ate and ate and took some to go and thoroughly enjoyed our meal and quiet chat. What a great place, great boss, and great team. We will be definitely be telling all our friends about it. Thanks for a...

It's a beautiful, bright store with an open kitchen, friendly staff and a promising menu.

Unfortunately, most of those promises were quickly broken.

For starters, many menu items were unavailable. Not a good start for a Friday night on a holiday weekend.

The Thai Basil stir fry had strips of dry, rubbery chicken of the sort bought precooked from a supplier, not the minced chicken promised by the menu. The sauce was overly heavy and here was far too much of it. This is a stir fry, the ingredients should have only a thin coating of the sauce. There shouldn't be 4-5 extra tablespoons worth of sauce floating around the bottom of the dish. The surplus of sauce left the basil, which is supposed to be the highlight of the dish, soggy, wilted and flavorless.

The pineapple fried rice had no pineapple whatsoever, no carrots, no egg. Just rice, chicken onion and cashews.

The crispy tofu was enormous blocks of greasy tofu not rendered crispy by frying, and not cooked through, though the sauce was good. The tofu would have been better off if it was cut into cubes about 1/4 of their actual size.

The mango sticky rice strangely used a purple rice, not the traditional opaque, white, glutenous rice.

Finally, the side of jasmine rice we ordered was missing completely.

We were really disappointed. We will...