Chob Thai

What should we know about Chob Thai?

Chob Thai opened in Clontarf last September where Picasso Italian used to be on Vernon Road, but we heard nothing about it until they started to invite some influencers in for dinner a few months ago. Suddenly it started appearing on our social media feeds, and man oh man did it look good.

The Thai owner told us he had lived here as a child before returning home to Thailand, and always thought it was somewhere he wanted to come back to. His Dad later moved back, and he followed, with a dream of bringing real Thai food to Dublin, which he said was almost impossible to find here. He found chefs through friends and family who agreed to move too, found the site in Clontarf and they were off. We love the sentiment, and we love anyone who's trying to replicate a country's cuisine as genuinely as possible, without making allowances for locals, so a table was booked lickety-split.

Where should we sit?

The compact downstairs has a more Thai vibe, with the pre-existing exposed brick working nicely against Southeast Asian art, woven wall-hangings and a gold Thai headdress sitting in the window.

Window seats are always where it's at for us, with these ones giving a view of the Clontarf coastline and plenty of people-watching opportunities.

There's a larger room upstairs which feels unfinished in comparison, and lacks the same ornamental detail and warmth.

What did you eat?

Well this is where it gets complicated because we had two very different meals here, from three very different menus. Strap yourself in for what hopefully won't be too confusing a ride.

On our first visit we were given the regular à la carte menu full of dish after dish we couldn't wait to get our forks into, as well as a much more subdued lunch menu (two courses for €28.50), with only two mains that seemed to have anything to do with Thai cooking. Sweet and sour crispy chicken does not a Thai meal make. As the Tom Khaa soup and Pad Thai were on there, we took the savings of €7.50, and stuck to à la carte for the rest.

Soups (€11.50 - €12.50) come with a choice of prawns, fish, chicken or vegetables (oddly the vegetable option is the same price as fish or chicken which is sure to displease veggies), and we picked fish after being told it was fresh not frozen (tick). As soups go, this is a knockout, with creamy coconut, lemongrass, galangal, lime leaves, mushrooms and coriander, the tender, flaky fish peaking out of the broth in generous quantities - vivid flavours that will stay with you after you leave.

Duck spring rolls are also on the €28.50 two-course lunch menu (€12.50 on the à la carte) and they're as good as we've had anywhere - obviously homemade and hand-wrapped, the crunchy shells packed with chunks of duck from an animal clearly cooked in house, along with vermicelli noodles and crunchy vegetables. This was very nearly an "oops we ordered another portion" moment.

Pad Thai (€24.50) comes with prawn and chicken as standard, and was more flawless Thai cooking - a riotous patchwork of rice noodles, beansprouts, just cooked veg and egg, with finely chopped peanut, chilli powder and lime juice to adjust to your palate's preferences. If you've never tried the famous Thai dish before, this is the place to have your first taste.

The fresh not frozen seafood policy also extends to the crab fried rice (€24.50), which was positively packed with the stuff, chunks coming up in every fork. Perfectly fluffy rice had onion, spring onion and egg through it, with lime on the side to be liberally squeezed over, and the simplicity of the rest let the crab shine through.

The traffic light curries most people will know come with a choice of seafood, beef, lamb, prawn, chicken or vegetables, and a lamb massaman (€24.50) was creamy and mildly spiced with onion, potato, carrot, and some cherry tomatoes on top - we scooped the bowl clean. Rice is extra at €3.50 for jasmine or €5.50 for egg-fried.

Desserts listed just a mango cheesecake (which at €12 must be one of the most expensive desserts in Dublin), as well as sorbet or ice-cream (also ambitiously priced at €10), but we'd seen the classic Thai dessert of mango and sticky rice on their social media channels, and when we asked they said they could do it. We've not sure whether they've stopped doing it altogether, or are waiting for new menus to be printed, but this was a sub-standard version, with under-ripe mango and rice lacking flavour. The ones at Full Moon Thai and Nightmarket are far better (and cheaper), using much more delicious mangos.

Sounds amazing. What went wrong?

Well we went back didn't we. Back to try more food to tell you about, and had a very different experience. We did think they were going to struggle to get people in at lunchtime with those à la carte prices, so on first glance the introduction of a new scaled back, less expensive lunch menu (€5-6 less for mains) seemed like a clever move, but the dishes we'd planned to order, like the jumbo King prawn silver noodle pot, and the deep-fried seabass with three flavour sauce were nowhere to be seen. Instead it was a basic two-pager of Thailand's greatest hits, with the addition of some new salads.

We forged ahead with the Thai-style chicken skewers with satay sauce (€8.50), and it wasn't a great start. Two thin, chewy skewers, and a lacklustre peanut sauce had us wondering if we were in the same restaurant.

A duck salad (on the two course, €28.50 menu), that we almost ordered the last time, was 90% salad vegetables, with severely over-cooked, dried out and chewy duck, in a one note spicy sauce.

Thai-style prawn cakes (€8.50) with red curry paste, lime leaves, green beans and Thai basil had the bouncy, juicy texture you'd expect, with the sweet chilli dip doing its job, but not leaving much in the way of taste memories.

By the time we got to the larb moo (Thai-style salad with minced pork, €13.50) we'd had enough of plate-filling, undressed vegetables - there's only so much raw lettuce, thickly sliced cucumber and cherry tomatoes anyone can eat. To eat insult to injury there was an unappealing sour taste to the dish (not Thai-flavour related) and we sent it back.

Onto mains and the three flame (the spiciest score) chicken with chilli and basil leaves (confusingly two flames on the new scaled back lunch menu) was mild enough for the spice-averse to eat (barring an occasional rogue dried chilli). If this is as spicy as the kitchen gets, they're undoubtedly toning things down for an Irish audience.

We ended with the worst of the lot. Buoyed by the fresh fish and crab meat on our previous visit, we went for the Penang curry with seafood. Big mistake. BIG. Calamari as rubbery as car tyres, mussels that tasted like they'd been cooked for the third time, prawns so tough they'd give prawns a bad name, and a single, sad scallop that had to be sawed through. The mild, coconutty sauce had lovely flavour - shame about the seafood travesty within it.

We're not blind to the fact that these are tough times for restaurants, but the way to make customers want to come through your doors is to offer something novel, exciting, different, that they can't cook at home or find in a multitude of other places. After our first meal we were sure there would be queues down the street once word got out, Thai food enthusiasts travelling from across the capital to get a taste of what's coming out of this kitchen. To see the dilution taken to increase customer numbers at lunchtime is like seeing a car speeding down a one way road and screaming "stooopppp!"

What about drinks?

You won't be coming here for the wine, which looks like a selection you might find in your local supermarket. There are eight by the glass, but we couldn't bring ourselves to dive in.

Cocktails appear to have had more work put into them, with loads of Thai twists on classic drinks, but there's a lot of sugar syrup throughout. We tried a lychee sake mojito which was a decent mojito, but we couldn't discern any lychee other than the one sitting on top of the crushed ice.

How was the service?

Pleasant but wanting, with the same muted server both times having to check and recheck what we'd ordered. Our mains were very slow in coming the first time, which was surprising as there were only a few tables filled, but things came more promptly the second time.

What was the damage?

The two course lunch from Friday - Sunday is €28.50, but if you want to go in the evening for the good stuff on the à la carte you'd want to budget at least €50 a head for three courses without drinks - that could jump above €60pp if you order prime seafood or beef. There is a three-course option for €45, but most of the stuff we'd want to eat isn't on there.

What's the verdict on Chob Thai?

Based off our first visit Chob Thai has everything needed to join the very top rung of Dublin's Thai restaurants, along with Full Moon, Nightmarket, Baan Thai and Achara, and we would have loved to be shouting that from the rooftops this week, but buyer beware when it comes to lunch. Sticking to your guns and waiting for your following to find you can be anxiety-inducing and expensive, but diluting down your product for a short-term hike in customers isn't the way to build a bustling business. Hopefully they see the light before too much damage is done, because when it's good here, it's exceptional.