Review Mai Thai - Prince George

Not gourmet but, reasonable food. Not very inviting. May be it was the item “Stir fry chicken” that I had ordered. I expected a dry stir fry dish with vegetables and chicken. But it was runny. May be, some other item would be more inviting. The salad was iceberg lettuce with sweet creamy dressing. Good service.

Enough is enough. Went for dinner here... Party of 2. I am besides myself how two entrees and a 6 dollar appie makes for an 84$ bill. Service is poor as the gentleman who serves the tables lacks professionalism and doesn't provide attentive service. Mai Thai makes good Thai food, but it's not 23-28$ per dish good and charging 3.50$ extra for rice is plain greedy when it is essential to the enjoyment of the dishes. They are pricing themselves out. Disappointing.

Another favorite in PG. Having travelled around South East Asia, places like this bring back those great memories. Tom Kah coconut soup with rice is so delicious. Full of flavour. I'm sure there's many great options on their menu.

I went with my family and one other family was going to join us. We were ignored when we entered but found a seat that could accommodate us. We stood at the table for a few minutes hoping the gentleman at the counter would acknowledge us. He did not, so we decided to sit in hopes we would be brought menus. As soon as we went to sit he looked up and said "can't sit there." After finally being acknowledged I said "good evening, we are just looking for a table for us and another family." He replied "no way," without any indication as to why it would be a problem. There was another family eating at another table, so his blunt hostility made little sense. I replied "that is fine, we will find another place to eat," and we walked out. It is unlikely I will ever support this business or recommend it to anyone after this extremely rude encounter.

This is an authentic Thai restaurant that looks like it is run by a couple. We ordered stir-fried noodles, Tom Yum Goong seafood soup and black glutinous rice taro. Every dish is delicious. Fried noodles are recommended.

My wife loved this place, I wasn't as enthusiastic. The food was good, but not great. Lunch was supposed to come with soup or salad, but they were out of soup.

Not the most authentic Thai I've ever tried but it's pretty good already! The tom yum is more on the sweet side. Pad Thai is ok too. Overall, I am very happy with the meal especially not so many options in the north.

The lowest quality thai food below street food, watery with least amount of curry paste and coconut cream or probably no coconut cream. Thai woman of low class, demeanor and rude uneducated manner. If you ask for something custom she will make it opposite, intentionally?... Pls someone open a thai restaurant in PG with real restaurant quality thai food, you will get our business. These jokers have even started charging for rice. Any street food in Thailand if equally watery at least made with love. This restaurant degrades thai food.

always my pick for my bday dinner �as usual loved loved loved it. had pacific snapper dish and the deep fried bananas.

Came in last night with my friend. It was my 1st time at your restaurant and I had never tried Thai food before. We ordered and split 1 Chicken Phad Thai, 1 order of the Green Chicken Curry with Coconut Rice! Delicious and cost us about $17 each. Will be coming back again!

My favourite spot to eat when I'm visiting Prince George!

Let’s go through the list. Malaysian? Check. Japanese? Check. Vietnamese, Chinese? Check, Ch…actually… Oddly, I haven’t taken in a Chinese restaurant yet as part of this blog. You think I would. It won’t be today, for today I’m bracing myself for Thai, a popular culinary option, but not often seen in restaurants in town. Instead, Thai is reserved for home cooking via premade jars and powdered mélanges necessitating little more than animal or vegetable parts and the proper utensils for cooking. This is in contrast to Indian food, which I have noticed a rise in restaurants and a lack of home cooks willing to try it at home. The extreme of this is sushi, an industry virtually cornered by the essential tools and skills required to do proficiently. It’s one of the reasons why I avoid making sushi myself. My little town is blessed to have a Thai restaurant, but is it a true Thai restaurant or a generic Asian location with added peanut sauce? I'm being conducted through this experience by a guide as charming as the meals she is about to order for us. I'm instructed that the first sign of a good Thai restaurant is the prevalence of Thai royalty, often seen in massive gilded frames about kingdom. I'm warned that unless I find a gaudy gold bordered painting presenting stately Asians with the emotional range of a runway model, I should turn and walk out. The second sign of a good Thai restaurant is its high quotient of elephants. Upon walking into Mai Thai, I'm greeted by two small gold statues and a giant elephant head behind the desk. No, it wasn’t taking orders…although in retrospect that would be a brilliant idea. I know I’m provoking an attack for claiming so but Thai cuisine has always felt like a blend borrowed from neighboring nations. With four countries surrounding it, your assumptions about Thai food can be considered wholly mistaken depending on which region you're visiting. When presented Thai cuisine in Canada, we're treated to a "greatest hits" collection from these various regions. This is similar to Indian food, where majority of dishes you recognize all derive from a single region a tenth the size of the country. This results in confusion about what is accepted as tradition. I was once criticized for using coconut milk in an Indian dish by a friend that claimed Indian dishes don't use it (he should tell the entire west coast of India that). With Thailand, its cuisine may appear to the cursory examiner as derivatives of Indian, Chinese, and Vietnamese dishes. However, this is mostly due to the lack of Cambodian, Burmese and Malaysian restaurants in North America. We do happen to have a Malaysian restaurant in town (previously reviewed), though I found it imitative of westernized Chinese food (which I never could find while I was China). I see these associations reflected in Thai mythology as much as in their food. For those that don’t believe me, I can show you a picture of a statue of a Buddha riding a four-headed nāga. To enforce the argument that Thai food runs the risk of being confusing, the yellow curry Mai Thai offers is nearly identical to its Indian cousin. The red curry eventually ordered is made from coconut milk while the pho we also get uses lemon juice. These two distinct bases originate from two different regions in Thailand, yet here they are side-by-side. With the pho, I'm served a delicious but perilous minefield sprinkled by inedible wheatgrass and leaves. Along with the pho is ordered something known only…as larb. I should first explain how I discovering larb. The menu lists a variety of salads, though only two have the name "salad" in them. The others are listed with a variety of titles, all seemingly derived from the same six single-syllable words, kaow, pak, nam, pick, pow, and tom. One has as many as four of these. Then, alone at the top, is a single word…larb. It stands out. Larb is a popular meat salad prevalent in Thailand and Laos, served with a side of lettuce. Its flavor and texture is unique and enjoyable. You think after soup and larb (also called larp, to my friends’ enjoyment), we would be done. The mains arrive, including red curry with a side of rice shaped like the bowl I would rather have it in. The red curry is more like curry soup, with chicken and various spices waddling in a loose coconut sauce. I am struck again by the practice of charging an extra $2.50 for rice; that's markup. It wasn’t even that much rice, not even close to match the amount of curry in the bowl. It’s important to know that I brought home a substantial amount of leftovers, mostly red curry. The larb was picked clean. Although I was warned that Mai Thai had very slow service, it didn’t appear the case this evening. The final price was considerable and reminded me a lot of Karahi King. With the tip, the total meal came to a fraction over $60. Granted, this did include four plates of food. I would wager to expect a lunch for one to cost a little over $20. Mai Thai doesn’t feel fake or rushed. It feels as though you are eating real Thai food, not a western translation like so many other Asian restaurants. Sometimes I get upset at the pressure we lay on restaurants, and the assumptions those restaurants make about the food we want. It’s a travesty in a town this big, with nearly a dozen Chinese restaurants in town, that none of them offers traditional Chinese food. Only one offers dim sum, and that dim sum being an embarrassing selection of shipped frozen premade dumplings and buns you can get cheaper from a local grocer. With Mai Thai, you get the impression that you're eating something taken directly from traditional recipes. Nothing feels adapted or sanitized for western consumption. I know this may not be entirely true considering my lack of expertise in Thai cuisine. Regardless, Mai Thai is the best we can hope for and it's far better than we expect. Food: 4/5 Service: 3/5 Presentation: 5/5 Value: 3/5 Recommendation: 4/5