I just had a birthday, and they took me out for a birthday lunch to beautiful downtown Conshohocken. Our destination was Chiangmai. This is very prototypical of other small thai places. They have a great lunch special, and most of us partook. Instead of the regular lemongrass soup (tom yum), I mixed it up this time, and went with something called jasmine soup. It wasn’t too exciting, but quite palatable. A light chicken broth with some lightly cooked veggies and mushrooms. Very plain.

A few peeps got the thai dumplings as an appetizer. These are deep fried and filled with pork and veggies. It comes with a sweet soy and sesame sauce. These are damn good and meaty. I got the tulip dumplings. It’s basically like shumai, and they are steamed. These were alright. They came with the same sauce as the thai dumplings. I like the thai dumplings better.

D ordered the red curry with beef. He liked it, but said it wasn’t spicy enough. It had two stars of spicy. K ordered sweet and sour chicken. He’d never had thai food before, so this was a completely new experience for him. But he didn’t want to be too experimental, so he went with sweet and sour chicken, always a very safe choice. Overall, he enjoyed his thai food experience. Good for him. He’s expanding his food horizons.

R ordered the thai eggplant with chicken. She loves this dish. And now I know why. Bit hunks of asian eggplant in a brown sauce with slices of chicken breast. Delicious. I went with my old standby, drunken noodles. I always get this, and here, it’s extra good. Nice pieces of chicken breast, fresh and big pieces of noodles, spicy, but not too spicy. You know I love this dish.

Service at Chiangmai is fairly good. It gets very crowded and busy during lunch rush, but the waitresses are very nice and the food comes out quite quickly. The water doesn’t get filled very often, but I won’t hold that against them. It’s also a BYOB. R also got me balloons and brownies for the bday. It was a fun and gluttonous day. Yes, that is a foot on my desk.

It certainly seems like I like thai food a lot. After all, I’ve eaten it nearly a handful of times in the past few months. The thing is, it’s not even my favorite! Of asian food, I much prefer Korean or Vietnamese. I think lately, it hasn’t been my pick, but it’s something that I’m always happy with. But not necessary my first, or second, or third choice. But always a fairly safe one.

On Tuesday night I really wanted a hot bowl of soup. Pho in fact. But I would have been happy with any big bowl of soupy noodles. Although there is a vietnamese place in Bryn Mawr, their pho is weird, so we passed on it. Z wanted thai so we headed to Silk Cuisine in Bryn Mawr. It was cold, miserable, and raining out. The place was dead. We were the second and only other party there. I guess people in the burbs don’t get out much when it’s cold and raining in August.

We started with the seafood rice soup. I tell ya, this soup is damn great. It’s a simple light broth with rice and lots of seafood. Crab claw meat, squid, and shrimp are included amongst the greens. It definitely has a strong seafood flavor. If you like seafood but don’t like stuff to smell seafoody or taste extremely from the sea, then don’t get this. But for those of you who truly love seafood, this soup is the one for you.

We ordered shrimp with bamboo. It was basically a bunch of big shrimp with bamboo shoots and other veggies in a thai basil sauce. You know thai basil sauce, it’s very distinctive and can be easily found in every thai restaurant. This dish was good. The shrimp were big, there were a lot of them, and the flavor was well dispersed through all the ingredients.

Like I said, I wanted a noodle soup dish. No noodle soup dishes were to be found on the Silk Cuisine menu. I went withe closest thing, the baked tofu. It didn’t exactly serve as a good substitute for noodle soup. There were many many slivers of ginger. And the dish had an extremely gingery flavor. I like ginger and all, but I hate biting into ginger. It’s like they used ginger as the main ingredient, not something for adding a bit of flavor. So I had to remove them all. That took a long time. The flavor of this dish was very mild and plain. Nothing exciting about it. I added some chili paste and it tasted much better. It was fine, but it wasn’t a bowl of soup and it was hard to eat. I would never get this again. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it either. Unless you want to eat straight up ginger. Not bad, but nothing that I need to eat again.

The place has a decent sized dining room. It’s decorated in typical thai style, but there aren’t that many elephants on the wall. Service was good. But it better have been. There was a 1-to-1 ratio of waitress to table.

Silk Cuisine
656 Lancaster Ave
Bryn Mawr, PA
610-520-2470