Sawasdee

Sawasdee is located in Chinatown in Little Bourke Street. From the name, you may know that it is a Thai restaurant. I think Sawasdee is like saying "hello" in Thai.

When you first approach the restaurant, all you see is an unspectacular door. Fortunately, there is a girl dressed in a Thai outfit ready to pull you into the restaurant. It's becoming more and more common now to have staff outside a restaurant to attract customers. When you first go up the stairs past the ammonium smelling carpet, you are assaulted by a room full of green. The carpets to the chairs to a lot of the decoration is quite an ugly green. Everything looks so outdated and old.

There weren't a lot of people in the restaurant when we arrived at 7:30pm, not a good sign on busy Chinatown on a Saturday. Once again, I told myself to reserve judgement till after the meal. It did fill up a bit more afterwards, but was still fairly bare. The live music from the piano player was very loud and reverberated throughout the room and was actually very annoying after the first song. He was very good but it was just so loud and we were shouting to be heard over the music.

The Kai Yang (below) was barbequed chicken marinated in lemongrass, garlic and coriander. I couldn't really taste the lemongrass. It just tasted like regular barbequed chicken with some sugar on it. The sour vinegar sauce helped to give the chicken a bit more flavour.

The Gaeng Daeng curry (below) where we chose to have with roast duck was ok. The roast duck was a bit flabby (I can't think of a better word). It needed to be more roasted to give a better flavour.

The Pla Pao (below) was a whole fish wrapped in banana leaf and barbequed. We chose to have Barramundi, which was supposedly live still, but who knows. Even if they show you the live fish, they may just take a dead one after and cook that. I once saw a guy take a live lobster out of a tank in a Chinese restaurant, then he went into the kitchen but moments later I saw him sneaking back out and putting the lobster back in the tank hahaha. Anyway, the fish was a bit muddy in flavour but the sauce helped to mask a lot of it.

Overall, the meal was passable but too expensive for the quality of food. The service was attentive and professional. The atmosphere wasn't too good, the pianist was just too loud and actually detracted from the atmosphere. The terrible interior was just an eyesore and the green colours just keep assaulting my eyes.

Overall Rating: 9/20, I personally wouldn't go back to this restaurant. The food was ok and service good but too expensive. I couldn't stand the interior of the restaurant and just can't enjoy food in that environment.


Scores: 1-9: Unacceptable, don't bother. 10-11: Just OK,some shortcomings. 12: Fair. 13: Getting there. 14: Recommended. 15: Good. 16: Really good. 17: Truly excellent. 18: An outstanding experience. 19-20: Approaching perfection, Victoria's best.