With our day spent playing board games in the inner west, we stopped by Maenam Lao & Thai after our original plans to eat fried chicken at Red Pepper Bistro fell through.

As can be expected, it’s the Larb Dip ($13.90) that draws us here. It’s described as ‘a Lao specialty of chopped raw beef, Asian herbs tossed in an anchovy lime dressing and grounded roasted rice’.

This one here is very generous on the beef and light on the tripe without the bed of lettuce to pad the base as at Holy Basil. Ordered with medium spiciness, the dish has a healthy heat with a balanced savoury acidic flavour without delivering a mouth-burning heat until we alternate between bites of this cold larb and the warmer dishes.

This is the Salt and Pepper Eggplant ($14.90), ‘deep fried battered eggplant seasoned with salt, pepper and shallots’.

The eggplant is sliced thin with a crispy light batter that’s seasoned with just enough flavour that the dip of sweet chilli and fish sauce isn’t required.

This is the Pad Kee Mao with Beef ($12.90), ‘work fried flat rice noodles with seasonal vegetables and egg in an aromatic combination of soy sauce, garlic, chilli and basil’.

Fresh chilli makes D sweat buckets and this dish is so exception, with D enjoying the wide flat noodles. N ordered the same dish with chicken ($12.90) and both dishes lacked an element of hint of acidity to cut through the heaviness of the sauce.

This is the Pad See Ew with Chicken ($12.90), ‘stir fried flat rice noodles with egg and Chinese broccoli in sweet oyster and soy sauce’.

T enjoys the first few bites of this noodle dish, but again the lack acidity to cut through the heaviness of the sauce made the dish a little challenging to finish.

Overall, we enjoy the larb and eggplant dishes, but would be hesitate to reorder the noodle dishes without the addition of a wedge of lemon or lime.

Maenam Lao & Thai is located at 31 The Boulevard, Strathfield NSW 2135.