Tom yum soup (with seafood!): Good; spicy with plentiful seafood
Pad thai with chicken: Fourteener
Pad kee mao with tofu: Very good; well-cooked vegetables
Now that we have this blog, we’ve been making a point to eat Thai food as part of significant events so we can write about them. On our first Long Weekend Away (milestone!), we flew to Denver and planned to meet a college friend of mine for lunch before heading into the mountains. When she asked for restaurant ideas, Thai was our obvious cuisine of choice, and 9Thai fit the bill of being highly rated and located in downtown Denver.
The first thing we noticed after being seated was the decor. The walls were decorated with what appeared to be full-length dorm-room mirrors from Target hung horizontally instead of vertically. While some might call this a cheap alternative to professional decorating, I’m going to call it a resourceful, budget-conscious, DIY life hack. The mirrors were hung on opposite walls of the restaurant, creating the always-entertaining “Look, there’s a whole bunch of me!” effect. We didn’t capture this in a photo, but rest assured that we did enjoy it greatly.
Despite the multiplicitous instances of us residing in the mirror realms, we have yet to unlock the secret to being able to delegate life obligations to these clones of ourselves so that our original selves may enjoy a life of perpetual exploration and leisure.
I hadn’t seen or talked to my friend from college, Sarah, for several years (maybe five??) before planning our meet-up. She lives in Fort Collins and kindly drove down to Denver to meet us. Despite being eight months pregnant, when she walked in she was exactly the same as I remembered: striped shirt, beanie hat, sweet tattoos. Since my only method of keeping up with her had been occasional Instagram posts, I had forgotten how animated she is, and how that’s one of my favorite things about talking with her.
Sarah insisted on ordering her food as mild as possible, no matter how much I insisted that having her baby today would be totally fun and a great vacation story. The service at 9Thai was a bit slow, but the food overall was very satisfying. The only small-size tom yum option on the menu was seafood tom yum, which abounded with squid rings, fish balls, and one gigantic mussel. We ordered all of our food medium spicy, but the soup was spicier than either of our entrees.
It was a pleasure to meet Sarah. Going on simply your conversations over lunch (and the greeting and departure hugs), I found her to radiate a dynamic, positive, and enthusiastic personality – in my mind Colorado incarnate. I look forward to seeing her again when we return to Denver, and meeting her husband and baby.
With the slightly reddish house Pad Thai sauce and the coconut accents, I anticipated a syrupy sweet flavor similar to Thai Cafe’s offering. 9Thai’s dish was sweet, but subtly and pleasantly, and the sweetness served to differentiate it from the other Pad Thais I’d experienced lately. The noodles were slightly more elastic than what I was used to but this did not detract from the quality.
When I started eating my pad kee mao, I was struck by a strong black pepper flavor that I didn’t expect. It wasn’t unwelcome, but it subsided as I continued to eat. The vegetables were cooked to the perfect point of being crisp but not raw; I especially enjoyed the broccoli.
Sarah had pad see ew and mango sticky rice, which she reports were very good as well.
I think the success of a lunch can be measured by its length. When you leave a place two and a half hours after you sat down, you know you had a good time. We made plans to meet up again when Mark and I come back for a conference in December. Time to look up Thai restaurants in Fort Collins.