Photos by Evie Carpenter/DD
Grade: B
Thai Elephant, located on Adams Street, is one of downtown Phoenix’s most accessible Asian restaurants. Its sweet and savory dishes have a just-like-mom-used-to-make kind of taste –- if your mom is from Thailand.
While other nearby Asian restaurants, like Sens and Nobuo, cater to Asian food aficionados, Thai Elephant keeps it simple with large servings of soups and noodles.
The restaurant offers a sit-down atmosphere and high-quality food, but dishes out its meals at a mysteriously fast rate, which is why so many people downtown — from students to business people to out-of-towners — fill the restaurant every day.
Its location in the center of downtown, a five-minute walk from ASU’s Downtown campus, makes it an easy spot for students to get lunch or dinner. This combination of convenience and good food makes Thai Elephant perfect for college students.
The Thai iced tea is the restaurant’s most recognizable drink. When it is served, black tea sits at the bottom of a tall glass, and the top half is an orange mix of cream and spices. A seasoned tea connoisseur might be disappointed; its sugary taste is more like a Starbucks drink than something you’d get at Royal at the Market. But for those wishing to experience the best of Thai Elephant, the Thai iced tea is the restaurant’s specialty.
For an appetizer, try the corn cakes, which are served as eight thin triangles with a dipping sauce. This dish tastes unusually American because of the corn, but the sweet sauce adds an Asian flair. Chunks of corn break up the texture of the bread and add variety.
The panang is Thai Elephant’s best entree by far. Panang is characterized by its peanut-based curry sauce, which adds a distinct, delicious flavor to your choice of a variety of meat, seafood or tofu. I recommend the beef, which is the usual ingredient of panang. An assortment of vegetables such as zucchini and bell peppers add to the variety of textures, which are all served in the savory but sweet sauce. A small side-bowl of white rice comes with the meal; dump it onto the plate and mix that in with the rest. The panang is proof that if a sauce has the right flavor, it can be put on any kind of food.
The drunken noodle is another specialty. Its sauce tastes a little like soy and a little like garlic, but is used thinly enough so that it doesn’t drench the meat or noodles and doesn’t taste overwhelming.
Thai Elephant has its faults: The decor is charming and classic at first glance, but the wallpaper is peeling and the music is too loud … and who plays Aerosmith at a Thai restaurant? Strange music from the ’90s is ever-present at the Thai Elephant.
Maybe these faults are a byproduct of the restaurant’s speed. They might have so many customers getting food to-go that no one notices the small deficiencies. Or maybe there are enough customers who have fallen in love with the panang that they just don’t care. I mean, that’s why I keep going back.
Contact the critic at john.l.fitzpatrick@asu.edu
