{"id":842,"date":"2010-06-21T15:57:32","date_gmt":"2010-06-21T22:57:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/norwitz.net\/blog\/?p=842"},"modified":"2010-06-21T18:35:32","modified_gmt":"2010-06-22T01:35:32","slug":"lemongrass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/norwitz.net\/blog\/2010\/06\/21\/lemongrass\/","title":{"rendered":"Lemongrass Thai Cuisine (Petaluma, CA)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading reviews of Lemongrass Thai Cuisine, I’m shocked by how many people love it.\u00a0 Did we go to the same place?\u00a0 Did they change chefs?\u00a0 Are all the reviewers blown away by anything a step above fast food?<\/p>\n

Lemongrass Thai Cuisine<\/strong>
\n109 N McDowell Ave, Petaluma, CA 94954
\n(707) 789-9777<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As we perused the menu, the waitress brought us a bowl of styrofoam.\u00a0 I mean shrimp chips.\u00a0 In pretty colors.\u00a0 With dip.\u00a0 I asked if there was egg (my daughter is quite allergic) and she was sure there was not but offered to show us the box.\u00a0 She was right but, given they were from a box and the list of artificial food dyes in them was longer than the list of the other ingredients, we asked her to take it away.<\/p>\n

We started with the coconut soup, or at least we tried to.<\/p>\n

\"Coconut<\/a><\/p>\n

Tom Kha, “coconut soup based seasoned with lime juice, kaffir lime leaves, mushrooms, onions, and carrots.”\u00a0 $8.50 for a large (ordered with 3 bowls) plus $2 for “prawns.”\u00a0 It was served with the rest of the meal, not in the 15 minutes or so while we were waiting.\u00a0 It came with no bowls and the only spoon was a soup spoon, nothing to serve with.<\/p>\n

I love coconut soup and order it whenever I get the chance.\u00a0 Picking out all the pieces of roots and leaves that make up the complex flavors is part of the fun.\u00a0 Except there weren’t any.\u00a0 No flavors from them either.\u00a0 The mushrooms were white button, cut in half, the onions were undercooked slices of plain yellow onion, and the carrots were flavorless and too uniformly cut (with scallops) to be house prepped.\u00a0 There were at least a fair number of shrimp (does keeping the tails on turn them into prawns?) for the $2.<\/p>\n

How do you make coconut soup?\u00a0 I imagine fresh coconut milk seeped in herbs and spices and tangy from lime.\u00a0 I don’t know what recipe Lemongrass used but it was something like: open cans of coconut milk, add to pot with several cups of sugar, add vegetables, cook until light gel stage.\u00a0 I make coconut ice cream with canned coconut milk and the soup was actually sweeter.\u00a0 Finally, I gave up and asked for fish sauce (which came in a small bowl, tasting mostly of water and salt)\u00a0 and dumped it, plus the “hot” sauce from Michael’s dish into my soup bowl, but nothing cut through all that sugar.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I also ordered a peanut sauce dish.\u00a0 I expect this to be sweet, but it should fundamentally be savory, with complex flavors.\u00a0 Like the soup, it felt more like dessert.<\/p>\n

\"Vegetables<\/a><\/p>\n

Pad Peanut Sauce, “stir fried mixed vegetables and fried tofu with peanut sauce.”\u00a0 $8.50.<\/p>\n

More of the same mushrooms, carrots, and onions, plus some welcome nicely cooked green beans, red bell pepper, pod peas, and a bit of raw cabbage.\u00a0 No sprouts, no chopped peanuts, just some cilantro and a slice of orange.\u00a0 We knew this version didn’t come with noodles and we asked for all our dishes to be egg free. The sauce was not thick or cloying, like I feared, but the overwhelming flavor was sugar.<\/p>\n

We fared a bit better with the other two dishes.\u00a0 Miriam of course wanted some chicken.<\/p>\n

\"Barbecue<\/a><\/p>\n

Barbecue Chicken Rice Pot, “vegetarian fried rice, with sliced barbecue chicken on top.”\u00a0 $10.50.<\/p>\n

Miriam loved the soup and tofu (such a sad comparison to when she was a toddler sucking on a piece of ginger pulled from a bowl of soup at a different, better, Thai restaurant) and ate plenty.\u00a0 She claimed to enjoy this dish but barely touched it.\u00a0 Michael says the chicken was pretty good, though a little bit\u2013surprise\u2013sweet.<\/p>\n

The oddity was the rice.\u00a0 Since we saw brown rice on the menu we asked if they could use it here, done with no egg.\u00a0 Yes, we’ll give you steamed brown rice.\u00a0 We don’t want steamed rice, we said, the menu says stir fried.\u00a0 They promised they would do it, in a freshly washed pan.\u00a0 So what did we get? steamed white rice with raisins.\u00a0 I’m not joking…raisins.\u00a0 Had I noticed this early enough I would have sent it back.<\/p>\n

Michael’s dish was the best of the night, though not for him.<\/p>\n

\"Prig<\/a><\/p>\n

Prig Pow Seafood, “prawns, calamari, mussels, scallops, and sole.\u00a0 Sauteed with vegetables in dry chili paste.”\u00a0 $12.95.<\/p>\n

Since it was Father’s Day, I encouraged him to order the dish the way he liked it, even if no one else would touch it.\u00a0 So he asked the waitress (a different one from above) to make it extremely hot.\u00a0 What followed was a comedy of sorts.\u00a0 So no spice? she asked.\u00a0 No, I want spice, make it the way you would for a Thai person, not an American.\u00a0 So do you want spice or no spice?\u00a0 Very spicy, he insisted.\u00a0 He ended up with a nice bowl of seafood, some beans, peas, carrot, and cilantro, in a sweet mildly spicy sauce.\u00a0 Mild enough for me to pour into my soup and onto my plate.\u00a0 At least it had a flavor beyond sugar.<\/p>\n

Most of the reviews<\/a> I’ve seen talk about the wonderful friendly service.\u00a0 Again, I have to wonder if we went to the same restaurant.\u00a0 The waitresses were nice enough, and always topped up our water, but they messed up the soup and didn’t provide serving utensils for all the dishes (plus included a steak knife with the already sliced chicken). There were no condiments and it took some doing just to get fish sauce.<\/p>\n

Our primary waitress laughed, actually laughed, each time we asked for something or made a comment.\u00a0 I am sure it was just a nervous titter over her English being so poor she didn’t understand us, but my mind couldn’t help interpreting it as rude.\u00a0 This is how we ended up with things like mild vs hot spices or the disaster which they called rice.\u00a0 Instead of telling us she didn’t understand, or grabbing the other waitress (which she did at times), she nodded and told us it was fine.<\/p>\n

My guess is that other reviewers have both a higher sugar tolerance than we do (it’s the next day and my head is still buzzing) and happened to hit the better dishes but miss the awful ones.\u00a0 In fairness, it’s a huge menu and we only had 4 dishes.\u00a0 If we hadn’t had the soup, we probably wouldn’t be panning the place so badly.\u00a0 The food was cooked well.\u00a0 The problem was the ingredients.<\/p>\n

Menu Pages:<\/h2>\n

Page 1<\/a> – Page 2<\/a> – Page 3<\/a> – Page 4<\/a> – Page 5<\/a> – Page 6<\/a> – Page 7<\/a> – Wine<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading reviews of Lemongrass Thai Cuisine, I’m shocked by how many people love it.\u00a0 Did we go to the same place?\u00a0 Did they change chefs?\u00a0 Are all the reviewers blown away by anything a step above fast food? Lemongrass Thai Cuisine 109 N McDowell Ave, Petaluma, CA 94954 (707) 789-9777 As we perused the menu, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[26,32,40],"tags":[48,7,6,8,61,77,33,59,5,12],"class_list":["post-842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-restaurant","category-sfba","tag-asian-food","tag-dairy-free","tag-egg-free","tag-gluten-free","tag-petaluma","tag-photos-food","tag-seafood","tag-sonoma-county","tag-vegan","tag-vegetarian"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/norwitz.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/norwitz.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/norwitz.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/norwitz.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/norwitz.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=842"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/norwitz.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":866,"href":"http:\/\/norwitz.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842\/revisions\/866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/norwitz.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/norwitz.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/norwitz.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}