We love Thai food and always searching for places which serve ‘Pla Lad Prik’- crispy fried whole fish in sweet and spicy sauce. This authentic Thai dish is a specialty but not many restaurants offer it on their menu. But the most popular Thai dish offered in every restaurant is Pad Thai. The easiest taste test of Thai restaurant is eating their Pad Thai , hence I ate this recently for lunch at Thai harmony.
Thai harmony is the Thai restaurant which seems to be doing well nestled in the commercial front of Steiner Ranch. This same location used to have an Italian restaurant and a burger place which didn’t do very well and closed down. The Thai restaurant may have made some changes to the Feng Shui of this place or it filled the need of Asian cuisine in this area!
The restaurant offers a Thai menu and has just started some Vietnamese dishes too. They have a limited lunch menu compared to the dinner menu for obvious reasons. There are not many offices in this neighborhood and hence the lunch crowd is limited to a few Steiner residents eating lunch at the restaurant or grabbing takeouts for lunch. This restaurant is child friendly with a playscape too in its yard.
The lunch menu comes with spring roll and soup/salad of the day along with the order of entrée. The egg spring roll was crunchy and tasty with a sweet dipping sauce. But the soup of the day which was the egg drop soup was starchy. When my husband set it aside without eating, the hospitable waitress enquired and brought in the salad instead which comes with peanut sauce as topping.
Our entrees were Pad Thai noodles with shrimp and cashew chicken. While we ordered to make the cashew chicken spicy with five stars, it was only medium hot, while the pad Thai was ordered medium spicy, it was relatively mild. Hence raise the stars to more if you want spicier!
The Pad Thai – stir fry rice noodles with egg, bean sprouts, scallions and peanuts was pretty tasty, but the shrimp would have tasted better if it were cooked a little more. The cashew chicken with cashews pineapples, carrots, onion, mushrooms and scallions was an interesting and scrumptious dish.
We of course spiked it to hot and spicy for our tastes by asking for their chili sauces. Surprisingly for a Thai restaurant the tables just have salt and pepper shakers, not an assortment of chili sauce, soy sauce and mustard which is common in most Thai restaurants!
The wait staff was friendly, ambience comfortable and food decent.
Cuisine: Thai
Price Range: Moderate
Rating: ***
Website: http://thaiharmony.us/
Location: 4300 Quinlan Park Road, Steiner Ranch, Austin, TX-78732, 512-535-7975
Dishes Reviewed:
• Cashew Chicken.
• Pad Thai noodles with shrimp
• Egg drop soup
• Egg rolls
