Thai food can be daunting if you're unfamiliar with the cuisine. Big menus with so many unclear photos featuring limp-looking dishes that do little to stimulate the appetite.
So for the uninitiated, the Caesar Park Taipei, opposite Taipei Railway Station, might be one place to try. During weekdays until the end of this month, the hotel's second-floor coffee garden hosts a Thai buffet, with more than two-dozen dishes to choose from.
But like most buffets, this one doles out the quantity, and skimps on the quality.
The selection ranges from cold to hot dishes, with such choices as Thai-style green papaya salad, made on-the-spot by one of the chefs, and ribs simmered in a masamae-curry sauce. Meats and various types of seafood are also prepared Thai-style, using ingredients such as spicy red peppers, lemongrass and lemons, all imported from Thailand.
"The chef who came here to instruct the staff is from Thailand," said Amy Chen, a spokeswoman for the hotel. "In other words, he is a very traditional chef. He knows what these dishes taste like in Thailand."
The Thai buffet tends to draw a mix of hotel guests and nearby businessmen. They all seem to line up at once exactly at 12pm, eat for an hour, then leave. Perhaps the earlier the better, since the hot dishes turn cold quickly.
As with any buffet, it's best to sample everything and take more of what you like. Among the hot dishes, the deep-fried minced shrimp cakes tasted best. They also appeared to be the most popular, since the chefs had to fry up new batches every 20 minutes or so.
The rest of the hot food, though, suffered from standard buffet-syndrome -- lying helplessly in a stainless-steel pan begging for attention. The cold dishes, on the other hand, were much more flavorful. In particular, the green papaya salad and the baby octopus and mushroom salad were both rather sprightly, leaving a decent, though at best fleeting, impression.
Desserts were standard fare, mostly cakes and Haagen-Dazs ice cream left over from the western-style buffet that replaces the Thai one on weekends.
A more Thai-style dessert offered is one the hotel calls Combo in Coconut Milk (
The buffet costs NT$549 a person. If you decide to splurge, be sure to bring paper and pen, and write down the names of the dishes you try. (There are name cards in English and Chinese next to each item.) This way, next time you tackle the menu at one of Taipei's many Thai restaurants, you'll be able to more-or-less put a name to a face.
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