Tom yum soup: Thumbs up
Pad thai with chicken: 
– A thought-provoking meditation on the texture of bean sprouts
Pad kee mao with tofu: Veggies were noticeably undercooked and it had cabbage, which I don’t think it needed, but still quite tasty
Ok, time to catch up. All of our fond Thai food memories are fading before we capture them.
We ventured to ThaiTanium during our big IndyFringe weekend. IndyFringe, for those of you uninitiated, is an annual festival of independent theatre that takes place on Mass Ave every August. There are tons of one-hour plays, comedy shows, dance performances, and other theatrical explorations to choose from. After poring over the options we narrowed our schedule to the following three performances:
- Mother Night, a theatrical adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel. The cast was only two actors, who shifted expertly between playing multiple different characters. Dramatic, well-performed, and eerily relevant to the current political climate.
- Haul & Oatz: Time Traveling Detectives 2. This was a sequel to a play I saw at the 2016 IndyFringe festival, which followed Haul & Oatz as they traveled through time solving crimes, wooing ladies, and being BFFs. This edition found Haul & Oatz in the Old West, trying to fix a malfunction in their robot sidekick, Michael Boltron. Deeply hilarious and totes ridic.
- A showcase of dances from the Indianapolis School of Ballet. Despite the theater being ice-cold, this show was still impressive and mesmerizing.
I don’t totally remember which performance our trip to ThaiTanium was adjacent to. I think it was actually prior to the one non-Fringe thing we did that weekend, which was go to an Indy Eleven soccer game with friends. I’m 70% sure it went down like this: Mother Night at 4pm, ThaiTanium, soccer game.
I had been to ThaiTanium once before and had learned on that occasion not to bother with their specialty cocktail list—they’re all on the fruity, sweet side, which is not my jam. We stuck to water (can’t remember if we were burdened with straws) and ordered our usual. Even though the vegetables in my dish were a bit undercooked I still dug the overall flavor, and I remember enjoying the soup as well.
For me the highlight of this outing was silently judging another couple at a table near us. I could see them over your shoulder and I heard them order. They both wanted their dishes as mild as possible, and she ordered pad Thai specifically with no vegetables. “Just noodles and chicken,” she said. “BASIC,” I said in my head. Then I noticed their matching Apple watches, which confirmed they were basic indeed. I shared my judgments with you occasionally throughout the meal but didn’t realize until after we left that you had no idea which couple I was talking about.
Yeah, the angle I had to the mirror behind you pointed my view to a couple that was apparently not the basic couple upon which you were casting unrelenting judgment. By appearance this duo seemed relatively complicated (what is the opposite of basic?). I can now safely divulge that after you remarked on the basicness of their matching Apple watches, I surreptitiously opened my Evernote app and deleted “matching Apple watches” from the Julia Christmas list.
Fun fact: ThaiTanium is also the name of a Thai-American rap group.