Busaba Eathai

There is a glut of Thai restaurants in London now, so any newcomers will have to be damn good to comptete with the established ones such as Addies, Thai Square, Blue Elephant etc.
This newly opened branch on Kings Road, Chelsea left a lot to be desired.
Three of the main courses came up cold (Pad Thai,Chicken and Beef) and only the duck curry (the one hot dish temperature wise) had any taste at all.
The Pad Thai was far too small to share-as were the other dishes and was very bland.
No deserts on offer and the wine we chose wasn't available.
This massive barn of a place will not survive in this very competitive area of London if they don't pull their socks up pronto

I generally have very good experiences at this branch and others, but recently things haven't been so great. I had a coconut-based dish which I hadn't tried before, which wasn't very well executed and the flavours were generally a bit weird. Then we had an incident in this branch where my small glass of wine was exactly the same as my fellow diner's large glass of wine. There was only one or two pounds difference between the two, but two members of staff just proceeded to tell us why we were mistaken and refused to accept any fault or concede in any way that maybe we were telling the truth. It wasn't worth arguing with them about, but I was rather saddened that we had to argue at all.

So, usually great food (the calamari and the various versions of pad thai are my favourites) but unpredictable service.

How did this make the top 50? I went to the branch in Westfield and it was extremely average. Very very very average. The menu was quite limited and stereo typical. The traditional dishes like pad thai were bland. Still, better Time Out introduce these restaurants than actual good ones so they don't become too popular.

Amazing Calamari