Buddha Ruska Thai Cuisine

My wife has very few food cravings.  She craves ice cream.  She craves chocolate.  She craves crappy pizza.  She craves potatoes, sweet corn, and hamburgers.  And she craves Thai.

Larb

We decided to give Buddha Ruska in West Seattle a shot one day.  It came pretty highly recommended, and it was not disappointing.  It just wasn't fantastic.  We ordered Chicken Larb, Lemongrass Chicken, Crispy Garlic Chicken, and Pad Thai.  The Larb was good.  The Pad Thai was good.  We still talk about the Crispy Garlic Chicken, it is crave worthy.  The Lemongrass Chicken was only ok.  A quick word on their spice levels, with the Larb you can taste it - but it's mostly just adding extra red pepper (lazy spice).

Pad Thai

Lemongrass Chicken

The Winner - Crispy Garlic Chicken

So what did we think in the end.  If you are in the neighborhood, it's a solid option.  If we do find ourselves again in West Seattle, there's a good chance we'll stop by for some of their Crispy Garlic Chicken.  I am not sure we would go out of our way to Buddha Ruska though, in particular as the service is a bit slow. 


Buddha Ruska 
3520 Southwest Genesee Street  
Seattle, WA 98126
(206) 937-7676
3.5 of 5

wild ginger in bellevue

My wife and I decided to visit Wild Ginger in Bellevue.  I had heard that Wild Ginger was lauded locally as one of the best new restaurants in Seattle in 2010.  As it turned out, it was Restaurant Week.  We were able to have three courses for $28, a fair price.

Wild Ginger has pan Asian fare.  Think, PF Chang's.  As we walked in, the hostess looked harried.  It turned out that an event bought out half of her restaurant, and with the Microsofties having easy access to it due to its location in the Bravern and Restaurant Week in Seattle, it was jumping.  She promised a 20 minute wait, and I responded by asking if she meant a real 20 minutes or optimistic 20.  If it was optimistic, we were out of there before dinner started.  She said real, and to her credit, we were seated at about 13 minutes into the wait.

My wife, who has been reading a book by Ruth Reichl, noted both that we were sat in the back corner of the restaurant, and that the chairs were comfortable.  This was, in her estimation, a minus and a plus (in that order).  Speaking of, we ordered fried oysters, pork (meatball) satay, Singapore beef, spinach prawns, banana bavarian cake, and pumpkin cheesecake mochi.

As for the food, the appetizers came out quickly and the pan fried oysters were good sized, fresh, tasty oysters. The sauce was sort of a jazzed up version of tonkatsu sauce.  (For those uninitiated, Tonkatsu sauce is used frequently in Japanese cuisine with, surprisingly, Katsu's [fried schnitzel-like dishes] and tastes like a sweeter version of A-1.)  The house-made pork satay, a pork "meatball" on a stick of sorts, was juicy with onion, pepper, and was grilled to display nice char marks.  It was very tasty, but its sauce was average - a basic sort of fish sauce with vinegar, a la egg roll sauce you can buy in a bottle at the Asian supermarket for $2.00 per jug.  The meatball-on-a-stick did come with a few house made pickles, which did a good job of cutting the fat and adding a nice pop of flavor.
 
The main courses were not what we anticipated.  The Singapore beef, my wife dubbed "eggplant seasoned with beef."  Frankly, it tasted like any good Szechuan beef with eggplant.  There was nothing distinctly Singaporean about it.  It was a good spice level for me, but too much for my wife - who had to give up after a small portion.  The spinach prawns surprised us too. Not necessarily in a good way.  As the picture makes clear, it was almost a creamed spinach with some fish sauce served over medium-large shrimp.  It started off pretty decent, but not reminding me of anything particularly "Asian" I have eaten, but lost its appeal after cooling.  Beyond the visual of a plate of green "gloppy" substance, it also had a bit more fish sauce than it needed.  The entree came with a  string bean plate that was no different than Chinatown for $5.  That said, it was a good rendition of the dish, and also had a good spice level. 

 

In the end, the desserts let down the rest of the meal.  The banana Bavarian cake was dry.  It had the flavor of banana, but didn't hit you on the mouth with banana like you may expect from a desert named "banana Bavarian cake."  The mochi, don't even get me started.   The pumpkin cheesecake was more like pumpkin pie filling, and the outer layer of the mochi was so thick as to almost make the dessert inedible.  They really let down the rest of the meal, which was itself a better rendition of PJ Chang's.

The service, in a word, was average.  It didn't take anything away from the meal, but certainly didn't add anything either.  Our drinks were filled, sometimes, and the waitress came around to ask about us, occasionally.  For the first time in awhile, a server earned a tip of 15%.  Average, but below my defacto average of 20%.  I would recommend this restaurant to anyone who wanted to go to a slightly upscale version of an average International District restaurant when a group, or husband/wife, cannot decide between Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

Wild Ginger in Bellevue
11020 NE 6th St. Ste 90. 
Bellevue, WA 98004 
(425) 495-8889
3.5 of 5

the tricities burn my face off!!

have you notice that i am a fan of spicy food?  i may not have made that abundantly clear.  i am a serious fan of spicy food.  love it.  


rarely are foods spicy to me that bother other people.  at indian restaurants, the pickled/spicy peppers that is both extremely citrus-y and hot, isn't that spicy to me.  wasabi doesn't bother me much these days.  jalepeno is more nutty than spicy.  crushed red pepper paste in asian restaurants is downright sweet.  tabasco is laughable.  whenever i go to a thai or vietnamese or chinese or mexican or any other place where they say they have a scale, 1-5, 1-10, i say 5 or 10 or 6 or 11.  


most of the time, when i like the food somewhere and i go back, i have to tell them to make it more spicy.  i tell them to not focus on my whiteness and treat  me like they would family.  that normally does the trick.  sometimes it takes some convincing.  capsicum doesn't bother me much, lots of black pepper does (but i just find that lazy).  ok, is the stage set?


it's not often that i'm surprised.  and i was surprised twice, in eastern washington.  it's not exactly the middle of nowhere.  the tricities are the third major population center in washington state, but they're not even as densely populated as a new york city or boston commuter suburb, let alone big city.

(phuket)

my first surprise came from phuket thai cuisine in kennewick.  they have a sign, "we take our spicy level seriously."  ok.  sure.  i got the go ahead from my wife to order one dish at 5 stars (their top).  it was the beef and basil stir fry.  the waitress, a teenage girl, says " are you sure?"  "yes i'm sure, thanks for the warning" i reply.  she responds, "the cook/owner hates it when dishes go back because they're too spicy.  she won't accept them."  i considered myself duly warned.  my wife ordered a pad thai.  


when the 5 star dish landed at the table, visually you could see the red pepper paste on the top.  mashed, thai peppers and oil.  you also smelled it.  after one bite, my tongue was on fire.  fire.  it took quite a bit of rice to calm down the ol' taste buds.  i could have honestly ordered it at 4 stars and been very happy.  5 was too much.  it was more like the kind of thing you eat on a dare.  that said, it did have a nice flavor.  the spice wasn't lazy, it was layered.  my wife's pad thai (a 2 i think), was a nice break - but she wolfed it all down.  i suffered in silence...


in the end we had a nice black rice pudding, which was very tasty and a nice way to conclude the meal.  by that point my mouth had recovered.  the food was shockingly good.  good in general, very good for kennewick.


if that was not enough, then there was woo's teriyaki in richland.  

they have korean (bibimbap and bulgogi), and japanese (yakisoba and teriyaki).  i ordered the chicken yakisoba, hot.  "how hot?  we do low, medium, and high heat."  i replied "high."  the pile of noodles, with brownish-red sauce, and teriyaki chicken hits the table.  it didn't look quite as foreboding as phuket, but phuk it was hot!  i'm talking burn my face off hot.  worse than phuket.  i turned to the businessman i was trying to woo and said "this is hot."  he smiled and said "well, i'd heard a story about a guy being surprised by the spice, but i was waiting to see your reaction to figure out of it was true."


stinker!  not a month or two earlier, we'd had another meal together at a local mexican place.  it was pretty good, and i ordered their camarones a la diabla.  i also had their "hot" salsa.  i didn't break a sweat, it was nothing.  i commented that the flavor was there, but it lacked a little in the spice department.  well, not woo's.  it was there on taste, even better than phuket, and it was there in spice.  i had to order a tapioca ball smoothie and steal some of my compadre's rice to beat the heat.  he was a good sport.  i finished most of the plate, but the food did burn going down.  did i mention my mouth was on fire?    


after i finish the dish, manlily, the waitress says, "how was it."  "hot" we reply.  she smiles.  "how do you normally get it?" asks my new friend.  "very very hot, it's two levels above yours.  if i don't eat in a few days though, i can't even stand the normal hot.  you just have to get used to it."  get used to it!  my mouth recuperated about 20 minutes after lunch.  i can only imagine very very spicy.


phuket thai cuisine restaurant
ste d, 1407 north young st
kennewick, wa ‎
3.5 of 5 (4 for tricities)
(yes, if you saw the earlier thai ginger post, this place is better than thai ginger.)


woo's teriyaki
1379 george washington wy
richland, wa ‎
4 of 5 (5 for tricities)

thai ginger

thai ginger is an institution in the greater seattle area. first in factoria, based in a trailer, the place touts its "on of the 50 best thai restaurants in america" honors from 2007. now it has 5-ish locations. in sum, very good thai food made for the american palate. here are the details:

the ambiance is very kitchy. bamboo, a little thai art, some background music that smacks of the way southeast asia is, in people's heads. it's about as authentic an experience as maggiano's is an authentic italian experience. service neither adds nor detracts, it's middling.

this go around, i had pad thai and mini egg rolls (egg rolls = not that great, without much flavor and no meat). last time it was red curry, green curry, and tom kai ka. this hardly represents the entire menu, but it's a decent cross section.

portions are small. smallish for a normal dinner, exceptionally small for thai served in america. food flavors are good, but i take exception to their spice. first, it is not spicy. 4, 5, whatever they call their version of the most spicy, it's not. what this means is, they're serving to an american palate, and/or they had enough people complain about real spice that they stopped and now a normal spice loving person can't get a reasonably spicy meal. next, lazy spicy. spice is not developed in an ingenious stewing concoction, or with a combination of spice sources or fresh peppers. it mostly comes from crushed red chili. verdict - lazy! now, for a disclaimer. if you have an american palate, that is to say, you are a normal person who likes normal fare in the good ol' u. s. of a., i doubt you'll be disappointed.

my first thai ginger experience was with a family group of about 5 or 6. everyone ordered something different, and it was a family-style type atmosphere. i ordered a green curry with (their max) 4 stars. i went to lengths to tell the waitress, disregard my whiteness and bring me real, thai-spicy, spicy food. she chuckled and said ok. it landed with some extra chili peppers/red chili flake, and she told me she would bring me more, but i declined. a spoonful of dry chili peppers might add spice, but that's it. it destroys any real flavor that the dish does have. i tried it. i looked around. is this a joke? another friend was there, a female who loved spicy food, she also found it lacking in the spice department. meanwhile, 4 other people kept talking about how spicy their food was, and one person had forehead sweat beads. i concluded, (as the other side of the table also ordered green curry) maybe they had made it out of the same batch and disregarded their request for 2 stars. and then i tried it. it was like eating green curry flavored coconut milk. their was nothing spicy about it. nothing. truly my puny 4 star spice was spicier than their 2 star cat-milk spicy food. shock. awe. shock.

what does this all mean? not much. it's passable. good even for seattle thai food. certainly overhyped, certainly catering to the eastside's bourgeois. if you're right there, i'd stop by and give it a try, but i would not go out of my way for it.

thai ginger
five locations
my experience from:
3717 factoria blvd se
bellevue, wa
425-641-4008
http://www.thaiginger.com/
3 of 5