For those of you who have been here awhile, you may remember Monsoon Café’s origins as an artsy second-story Thai restaurant above the current Downtown Grille.* There were funkily painted chairs and wall-hangings, a couple of intimately capacious seating areas, and an appealing and unusual menu. I don’t know exactly when it moved from that privileged evening-on-the-town location to the decidedly less savory house on the corner of 2nd and Market (@Echangy?), but I thought I heard the death knell approaching. Fortunately, I was wrong. Not only has Monsoon survived, it recently spruced up its menu and interior space, and has got it going on pretty much for… Read More
Posts Tagged Cuisine: Thai
Monsoon Siam 
Dec 10
If you’ll indulge me for a moment, I’m going to write a haiku about this most excellent of fried rice offerings:
Spicy rice mountain,
Teeming with brown-green goodness,
Chicken, basil, yum.
Thank you all so much. If you’d like to contact me for private parties or political speeches you can currently reach me at Guy Still Sitting at Table #11 Day After Day Eating Plate After Plate of Kapao Fried Rice with Chicken, c/o Lime Leaf Restaurant.
For real though, this dish kicks Thai and Chinese fried rice butt all over town, including the Chang restaurants. The difference is in the freshness of the… Read More
Best in Thai
May 1
Charlottesville loves its Thai food. We have eight Thai restaurants to pick from and not one seems to be hurting for business. Everyone in town has a fiercely held opinion as to which is the best, so it seems the ideal pick for our first Best in Chow. We’ve tried them all, multiple times, and can easily agree on two things: Lime Leaf is by far the best, and the fact that Thai ’99 wins the Best of C-ville’s Asian category every year is a shocking travesty of justice. We have some differences of opinion for everything in between, so check out our standings for Best of Thai. We’re sure you’ll disagree, so add your own list in the comments. Read More
Lime Leaf
Jan 10
I count eight Thai restaurants in the Charlottesville area, which is something to celebrate in a town of this size. But none is worth celebrating as much as Lime Leaf, the delicious gem tucked away north on Route 29 in the Rio Hill Shopping Center. I get a case of food rage every year when I read “Best of C-ville” and Thai ’99 tops the Asian category yet again. I’m not sure how C-ville voters continue to prefer one of the least impressive Thai places instead of the obvious best, but I hope anyone who hasn’t yet visited Lime Leaf will make the trek north to give the true deserving Thai champion… Read More
Tara Thai
Sep 24
I am deeply skeptical about Asian chain restaurants. So while I was initially excited to hear that a new Thai restaurant was coming to town, my enthusiasm fizzled when I heard it was a chain restaurant. That was going into Barracks. Chain restaurant, shopping mall, meh.
We went to Tara Thai with lowered expectations and left mostly satisfied, if not awestruck. Outside Tara Thai is the typical madness of Barracks, inside it’s swanky nightclub meets aquarium. The ambience is much nicer than expected and definitely a welcome departure from the usual dependence on fluorescent in many local Asian joints… Read More
Thai 99 II
Aug 4
When I ask people where to find the best Thai in town, they almost always say Thai 99. C-ville Weekly has given them the “Best Asian Restaurant” award on many occasions in recent years, and the web site refers to its Gardens Blvd location as “exquisite.” So how can it be that I’ve almost never had better than a mediocre… Read More
Best in Chow
