Amarin Thai Cuisine dishes up delectable delights

By Andrew Hardenbrook

With nightclubs, pool halls and plenty of restaurants, downtown Mountain View is an excellent way to spend an evening. The small strip offers Mexican, Indian, Asian and American foods. Each one looked excellent, but my sights were set on award-winning Amarin Thai Cuisine.

Amarin has different cultural ornaments that are tastefully placed along the walls without being too overdone. They give a ethnic feel to the establishment.

It is a pretty small restaurant and all the tables are together in one room, however the noise level is fairly low. The tables and chairs are unusually small. So much so, that images of grade school came to me as I sat down for the first time.

Now I love spicy foods, so I was pretty excited to order up some curry and let the beads of sweat form on my forehead. After taking some time looking at the menu, which has a wide range of vegetarian, poultry, beef, seafood and pork dishes, I decided my best bet was on the Green Curry Chicken ($7.95) with a side of steamed rice.

The next tough question was whether I wanted it mild, medium or hot. The problem is that you never now what mild, medium and hot mean. Cautiously, I chose medium.

Unfortunately, their medium is way below my level for mild. However, my server was happy to bring out a wide arrange of peppers so I could independently spice up the dish.

If spicy meals do not happen to be your favorite, do not shy away from this restaurant. Both the Ginger Chicken ($6.95) and the Cashew Chicken ($7.95) are extremely mild and very tasty.

The best way to ease the pain of the check is always with a delicious dessert. With this in mind, the Fried Bananas ($3.50) were chosen. They can come with either ice cream or honey, however fried bananas tend to be fairly rich so I recommend getting the ice cream. If you are a honey lover do not worry, you can cheat the system by asking for a side of honey after you get the ice cream and bananas. It is a little underhanded, but how much does honey cost anyway?

For a Friday night the restaurant was fairly open and there was no wait. This may be because the massive quantity of restaurants on the strip, but I want to blame it on the service.

We were sat extremely fast and we were able order without a problem, which is always a good sign. However, when the food arrived, one person did not receive her order. It took a significant amount of time for this to be fixed and at one point it seemed as though her order was never even entered. Also, each stage of the meal brought to our table a new employee. This made it extremely hard to tell who to signal for help.

Despite this, the food was good. It was nice to see a downtown area that, unlike San Jose, is easy to navigate and nicely decorated. *** $$

LOCATION

Amarin Thai Cuisine

156 Castro St.

Mountain View CA

(650) 988-9323