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A new Pad Thai-focused eatery is ready to fulfill your noodle dreams.
Pad Thaimee, run by longtime New York City restaurant veteran Chef Hong Thaimee, brings a noodle and rice-centric takeout-only restaurant to Greenwich Village. The concept is a pivot from the Chiang Mai native's latest project, Thaimee Love, a pop-up upscale BYOB Thai eatery that operated at 615 Hudson St. from last winter through this summer.
Now, Thaimee's goal is to create the "ultimate Pad Thai destination" which melds her love of modern Thai comfort food with the limitations of running and visiting a restaurant in pandemic-era New York.
“My goal is to make the best Pad Thai you’ve ever tasted,” says Chef Thaimee. ”I have vivid childhood memories of going to the night market in Thailand and smelling the caramelization of the palm sugar, noodles, and eggs drifting from the woks of Pad Thai all the way down the street.”
Using high-quality ingredients, Pad Thaimee wants to up the takeout ante of Thailand’s national dish. Thaimee's traditional method and technique starts with artisan-made rice noodles imported from Thailand, cooked over high heat in the wok with garlic, shallots, Asian chives, bean sprouts, pickled turnips and topped with crispy fried tofu and crushed peanuts. The sauce is Chef Thaimee’s special blend, a recipe perfected over the years at her East Village restaurant Ngam. For the sauce, real coconut sugar is combined with tamarind, fish sauce, and chilis, for the perfect balance of sweetness, tang, salt and spice.
Pad Thaimee brings a slight update to her fifteen-year-old recipe: Purple Cabbage, which emulates the crunch and bitterness banana blossom traditionally lend to Pad Thai made in Thailand.
Because you can only order Pad Thai so many times a week (alternatively, the limit does not exist), Pad Thaimee's menu offers four more items: Zucchini noodle Pad Thai (low carb), Pad Kee Mao (spicy drunken noodles with chili jam), green curry fried rice topped with soft shell crab and fried rice with Chinese broccoli and anchovies. Every entree is $15 (though there is a price mark up for added protein per dish) and can be supplemented with Thai iced tea or blue lemongrass iced tea, each $5 per bottle
Every takeout box from Pad Thaimee is lined with banana leaf, which helps preserve moisture and freshness, even when reheated the next day. Props to not eating it all in one sitting though.
Pad Thaimee is located at 116 W. Houston Street. Orders for pickup and delivery can be placed via TOCK and Grubhub.