Thai Cafe (revisited) - Milpitas

We've been to this restaurant a couple of year back and we liked it. It's been a while so we decided to give it a try again. Here's the previous review

We were there during lunch time and there were two tables occupied. After we were seated I took a look around. Decor was nice and bright. We got a corner spot with partial chair seating and rounded bench corner with red cushion. I didn't remember much about their decor last time so couldn't quite tell if there was any changes. But the crews didn't look very Thai to us even the young lady behind the register which we guessed should be the manager/owner. Could there be a change of ownership?



Anyhow, we were even more curious with their quality of cooking now. We ordered kee mao noodle, papaya salad and Thai sukiyaki. All those had chili sign next to it on the menu so we got to decide the level of spiciness.

The papaya salad came out first - gourmet style. Bigger plate but not a lot of content. But as soon as we got our taste buds on it, we were wowed with the flavor. The dressing was a combination of rough pounded red chillies, dried shrimp, shrimp paste (possibly), and lime juice. Once everything got mixed well, threw in green papaya and a couple of cut green beans and mixed well. Served with scattered roasted peanuts and cut cabbage on the side. The spiciness of the papaya salad was perfect for our taste buds. Enough heat to cause hubby to sweat but not so much to cause chilli high.

The kee mao noodle was a bit on the salty side. This version didn't come with enough basil and bell pepper so I think it tasted a lot more like pad see ew (stir fry wide rice noodle). The Thai sukiyaki was made with clear glass noodle stir fry with tons of celery and napa cabbage. It was more on the sweeter side but I loved it.

Towards the end there were a group of 18 people which pretty much filled up the entire restaurant. One of the girls brought us a dish that we didn't order. And I noticed the other girl brought order to the wrong table. And yeah we had time to notice all those because we were waiting for our bill which took a while to come by. I guess they were not very ready to have so many guests at the same time.

Thai Cafe
692 Barber Lane 
Milpitas, CA  (408) 955 9992
http://www.thaicaferestaurant.com/