2018
Now and then we wake up early enough to visit Macquarie Centre to avoid braving the constantly packed carpark. This visit, we have brunch at Khao Pla, a restaurant newly opened in December 2017 serving Thai street food. Its original store in Chatswood ranks as one of Adam Liaw’s favourite restaurants, and we enjoy his karaage recipe, so it seemed like a fair bet.
The interior is casual with an open pass and greenery laden.
This is the Moo Krob Pad Prik Khing ($18.00), wok-fried crispy pork belly with kaffir lime leaf and prik khing curry paste.
The pieces of pork crackling are deliciously crispy, while the pork itself is mostly tender (some bits were quite tough), with the beans carrying most of the spiciness from the curry paste. Surprisingly, even though prik khing is essentially spicy ginger, the notes of ginger do not have the characteristic flavour of ginger that we find so offputting in ginger generally. The spiciness was prominent but very manageable for Thai food.
This is the Yum Nashi Pear ($20.00), a nashi pear salad with crispy soft shell crab, coriander, shallot, roasted coconut, dried shrimp, peanuts, chilli and lime dressing.
The waitress warned that this would be spicy and it’s easy to mistake otherwise with its colourful non-red colours. The culprit, though, is in the fiery dressing of chillies in lime juice, palm sugar, garlic, and fish sauce. That said, it is an absolutely delicious dish for which we’d return even if we’d like the spiciness dialled down a notch. Like most good Thai dishes, the freshness of the nashi pear and the savoury relief from the (non-spiced) soft shell crab in the fiery and tangy dressing is an excellent balance of all the taste sensations – sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami.
And this is the Khao Pod Ping ($5.00), grilled corn with tamarind sauce. The slightly tangy notes of tamarind sauce add a tasty contrast to the sweetness of the corn kernels, while the coriander adds that extra pop of freshness.
The food at Khao Pla is a tasty rendition of Thai street food. It pulls no punches with the spice and avoids the overly sweet flavour of most Thai food tailored to Western tastebuds. The service is attentive with the food arriving in a timely fashion.
2019
Khao Pla may well be D and my favourite Thai restaurant in Sydney in terms of flavour and cost. We’re not in the area often but we pop by whenever we are.
D tries an old favourite: the Pad Thai ($13.50) with Pad Thai noodle with chicken, peanuts, chilli, bean sprouts, tamarind, dried shrimp and palm sugar.
The noodles have a delicious al dente bite to them and soak up all the delicious spicy, sweet, sour and savoury flavours with the bean sprouts and lime bringing some freshness. I’ve not been a fan of pad thai after a very lacklustre first experience during my university days but I’d be hooked it this were my first taste!
This is the Hoy Pad Ped ($22.00), wok-fried clams with chilli jam and Thai basil.
As with Yum Nashi from the last visit, the staff are very conscientious in making sure customers can handle the level of spiciness prior to ordering. These clams are definitely spicy — on par with the pipis at Albee’s Kitchen — and it’s the spiciness that makes tiny shellfish like clams and pipis so delicious in every bite. The spiciness here has a sweetness and depth of flavour to it. While the serving size leaves me wanting more, these clams were prepared impeccably with nary a hint of sand in them.
And finally, this is the Yum Mango (medium, $30.00), green mango salad with fried whole snapper, coriander, shallow, roasted coconut with chilli and lime juice. We were so impressed with the Yum Nashi that we returned to try the other ‘Yum’ dish on the menu. The salad here has less of a crunch than the nashi but an added sweetness with the same fiery chilli and lime juice dressing. The fish is fried to perfection — crispy on the outside with soft and tender meat inside.
Khao Pla has been one of our favourite Thai restaurants for a while, but our visits in the past year – compiled in this post – have seen a decline in portion sizes and quality ingredient that have made us pass it up in favour of other Thai restaurants such as Holy Basil.
This is the Thai Milk Tea ($4.50). It’s intensely sweet but the tea flavour was rather subtle.
We’re a fan of raw larb and it dawns on us that they serve a Larb Tartare ($13.00), an ‘Isaan style spicy raw beef salad with coriander, shallot, grounded roasted rice, roasted chilli and lime’.
The thin prawn crackers with a healthy shrimp flavour were an interesting addition to the dish that we’d not encountered elsewhere. They added an element of crunch along with the cucumber that contrasted well with the softer textures of the raw beef and mix of herbs. Alas, we were sorely disappointed by the lack of heat in the dish. It was almost as if they forgot to add the chilli.
We revisit the Yum Nashi Pear ($20.00), a nashi pear salad with crispy soft shell crab, coriander, shallot, roasted coconut, dried shrimp, peanuts, chilli and lime dressing.
This was a far cry from our first encounter with this dish. Whereas our earlier experience saw a generous pile of crisply sweet nashi pear, this time there was barely a sprinkling on the dish despite nashi pears selling for a reasonable and typical $5.00.99/kg. Instead, over half the salad was made up by shredded shallow and red onion. Without the sweetness to counter, the heat from the chilli was overpoweringly fiery, although it did not overwhelm the flavour.
Onto the last of the spicy dishes, this is the Kuay Teaw Kee Mao ($13.00), a ‘wok fried flat rice noodle with chicken, chilli, Chinese cabbage, bamboo shoot and holy basil’.
D enjoys spiciness but did not enjoy the kind of chilli used, which delivered a spiciness with a painful burn but without the pleasure of the flavour and overwhelming.
Finally, to finish on a positive note, this is the fail safe Pad See Eiw ($13.00), a ‘wok fried flat rice noodle with chicken, dark soy sauce and Chinese broccoli’.
The noodles deliver a healthy dose of wok hei with a balanced sweet-savoury flavour from the dark soy and a touch of freshness from the veges.
Overall, we’re not sure what happened between our first visit to Khao Pla in 2017 with our more recent visits in 2019, but there’s a clear decline in both quality and quantity that it leaves us reluctant to return.
Khao Pla is located at Level 3, Macquarie Shopping Centre, Cnr of Herring Rd & Waterloo Rd, Macquarie Park NSW 2113.