Fans of Thai cuisine and culture should head to Pai Thai at Al Qasr Hotel before November 20, while the venue is celebrating the Thai festival of Loy Krathong, or the Festival of Lights.
The festival brings the introduction of a special set menu, but the experience starts before any food even reaches the table – Pai Thai’s relaxed waterside location among the lagoons of Madinat Jumeirah is the ideal spot for an intimate tete-a-tete, and you can give your night an early flourish of romance by reaching it via abra from Al Qasr or Souk Madinat too.
Once the food does start coming, you might wish you’d swum to the restaurant to work up an appetite instead – we’d expected to have to choose from the variety of dishes on the festival menu, but instead the dishes just kept on coming. Starters consisted of moist crab dumplings, tasty marinated crispy chicken wrapped in pandan leaves and a side salad of green papaya, apple and cashew nuts.
Onto the seemingly endless stream of mains – it’s hard to pick a standout as the quality was universally high. Big juicy prawns were offset by sweet lychees in a red curry sauce, the crispy tofu light and fluffy with a tangy citrus marinade, tender strips of fried beef were smothered in a delicately spiced curry sauce that had enough flavour to entice, but enough subtlety not to frighten non-curry lovers. Fish fans were kept in the loop with a good-sized fillet of fresh sea bass flavoured with chilli and garlic. The major food groups were all ticked off with a generous side of asparagus and mushrooms in oyster sauce and, of course, the ubiquitous coconut rice.
By the time we’d valiantly battled our way through that banquet, it was becoming clear that desert would be a largely unnecessary addition, but in the interests of research we learned that the mango on offer was deliciously sweet and juicy. We had to admit defeat with the sweet sticky rice in coconut syrup – it was tasty, but just too much for both my dining companion and myself after such a comprehensive feast.
Pai Thai’s waterside deck is already an understandably popular spot with diners, and for the festival the venue has dressed it up a little further with traditional festive lights and decor, and even upgraded on the Thai tradition of floating decorated paper boats during Loy Krathong by decorating one of the resorts abras in order to host a traditional Thai dancer floating a few feet from diners – a welcome distraction from the sheer volume of food mounting in front of us. One word of warning for shoe lovers – the wooden decking looks great, but it has limited respect for the latest fashion – an unexpected extra form of entertainment came from watching diners (my own guest included) gingerly making the journey to their tables without losing a heel in the cracks between the boards – a minor observation, and hardly a criticism when the venue looks as good as this.
Pai Thai’s Loy Krathong set menu is available until November 20 at Dh280pp (min two people). The a-la-carte menu is also available throughout November. Reservations on 04 366 6740.
The National was a guest of the venue.
