Thai Bistro

Location

234 E Street

Downtown on E Street Plaza right next to Baskin Robbins

Hours

Lunch

Mon-Sat: 11:00am to 3:00pm

Dinner

Sun-Thurs: 5:00pm to 9:30pm

Fri-Sat: 5:00pm to 10:00pm

Phone

(530) 747-0123

Web site

http://thaibistrodavis.net/

Thai Bistro is a Thai restaurant and Satay Bar with an excellent location on E Street Plaza. They have a pleasant outdoor patio and semi-elegant decor. Expect white table cloths and mood lighting.

Often people write reviews about HAIR being found in the food.

Many of the dishes are quite unusual and the portions are large. Most of items are not found at any of the other Thai places in town. Not only is the food great but the service is speedy and mostly friendly. Be sure to try the black sticky rice dessert. They have good deals on lunch specials which are generous in size and generally include rice and salad. The lunch food is not the same as that served for dinner. At dinner, they charge an extra $1 per person for rice, so add that to your value calculations.

Drinking water is served from a pitcher that is slightly flavored with apple and mint.

The Aggie voted Thai Bistro as "Best Thai food in Davis" in 2004. They also quite frequently have coupons in the Aggie. For example, they ran at least four of them in the Aggie during October of 2005. As you may be more inclined to order a pricier special knowing a second dish is covered, it often ends up being a better meal for less.

Yum Duck: Duck meat with cilantro and green and red onions, tossed in a light sweet and vinegary dressing

Comments:

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• Reviews from 2004 and 2005
  

• Reviews from 2006
  

• Reviews from 2007
  

• Reviews from 2008

2009-01-29 03:08:49   The food is not the best, but its not bad. The food does come out somewhat slow, but overall a decent place. —JasonKong

2009-03-09 14:16:36   The dishes which are supposed to be spicy are not spicy at all. It is less authentic than the thai restaurant in Bay area. However, I still like Thai Bistro, especially for lunch. The service is a little slow. —faramita

2009-04-27 20:30:29   How does this place compare to Thai Nakorn in terms of pricing? Cheaper or more expensive? —ArianeMetz

2009-06-28 09:32:22   I went here for the first time yesterday and got takeout. I sat outside and had a couple glasses of the apple/minty water while waiting. It is delicious - I'm definitely going to try making something similar at home. The food arrived quickly and my Pad Thai was tasty. I'm sure it's not quite the same style you'd get in Thailand, but then American Italian restaurants don't serve things the way they make them in Italy, same with Chinese, Mexican and so on...American-ethnic is a breed of its own. —DanaSullivan

2009-08-06 20:21:56   i like the pad thai here. —Vi

2009-09-27 20:54:20   Pad Thai is good, yo. Big portions too —LoooongBusRide

2009-10-03 09:04:29   I love this place. It's my favorite Thai restaurant so far! The service is good and the food was just so delicious. I think the food here has more flavor than 2k... err, I forgot the name of the other restaurant (however 2k's service is absolutely amazing). Not to mention, the proportions are more than enough for one's stomach. Price is right for its proportions. =) —YLor

2009-11-20 10:45:47   My wife and I used to really enjoy Thai Bistro until we discovered that the vegetarian curries that we had been eating for years are all made with fish sauce. The server finally told us that they can not be made vegetarian after years of specifically ordering them fishless. I'm sorry to say that we will not be back. —ScottWeintraub

2010-01-08 15:22:00   I went to Thai Bistro for the first time a couple of days ago, and I really enjoyed the experience. The food came out very quickly, and our water was constantly refilled. It wasn't very busy, but sometimes little things like that can get overlooked. Their Thia Iced Tea is fantastic, and the Praram Pak was a tasty vegetarian option. —emmaleanne

2010-01-16 18:19:38   Let me start off by saying I grew up in the bay area, and ate thai food just about every weekend. I was a regular at a thai place whose owners were relatively recent immigrants from thailand. I just got back from living in thailand for 6 months. I enjoy my thai food. I had an old belief that there was NO good thai food in davis, from eating at Sophias [which is horrible and should not be called thai food], and 2K thai which was a hit or miss. Eating at thai bistro for the first time tonight reversed this misconception. For a good price there is a LOT of good food to be had. I ordered pad thai, and the Pad 'J' which is a fried eggplant dish. While I dont think I would have been able to get the eggplant dish in thailand per se, the flavors are wonderful and authentic to what seasoning should be like. It comes with a wealth of egglant and green beans, and a side of rice. And the pad thai looks like what it's supposed to, not bright yellow or pink or all that nonsense- it's flavored well with a great amount of additional ingredients [tofu, shrimp, fried egg etc] really just like what I would get at a restaurant in thailand that specialized in pad thai.
I know most people think "authentic?.. I don't know if that means its good." Well, it does. The food is not greasy but the noodles do not stick together, the food is wonderfully seasoned but not just salt and spice, this kind of stuff is what I look for in a thai restaurant. I will be coming here when I want thai food.

—alyssap

2010-01-29 11:50:20   I like this place a lot. The service is good and the food is excellent. Try the green curry with chicken and prawns, it is very very good. They also make a very good duck dish with a salty sweet dark sauce. the patio is a nice place to sit on a beautiful day. A very nice date restaurant, my wife and I go there often. They have a cucumber salad apetizer that is a great price for $2. —DagonJones

2010-02-03 14:31:18   I had the yellow curry and my boyfriend had a dish with noodles, chicken, and green beans (completely forgot the dish name). I'm generally not a huge fan of Thai food, but the curry was amazingly good and for a great price (eating the leftovers as I type this!). The only downside was that the potato chunks were a bit undercooked, but otherwise it was delicious. Dinner for the both of us was around $22, pretty good deal. This will definitely be the place I go to from now on when I'm in the mood for Thai curry. —AliceW

2010-02-11 18:43:39   I really like Thai Bistro. The food is delicious, and the restaurant feels upscale while not being very pricey. The servers are really friendly, and the outside patio is really nice when the weather's good. —bear

2010-04-22 15:18:04   Delicious food!! I highly recommend this place. I really like the lunch specials here; I've never been here for dinner. For lunch, the food portions are huge and the food is quite tasty!
The thai iced teas are great and the service is excellent. —areli00

2010-06-03 16:59:25   my fav thai spot! the boyfriend and i came here last year and we loved it. the housemate and i came here couple months back and the same. LOVE IT! so good! get the duck something. i love that one —Hollen

2010-06-03 20:07:55   Really big take-out portions and good food. —strawberry

2010-07-01 22:23:41   Tonight was my first time at Thai Bistro, I was craving for Thai food and was disappointed. The waitress forgot about us and we waited really long for our food. the Chicken curry and the pad thai was too sweet. the papaya salad is too americanized, i wanted authentic papaya salad, not papaya in lime juice. the thai fried rice was a bit wet but it was good. —walkingtoclass

2010-07-07 14:06:28   I think I commented on Thai Bistro sometime in the past, but it's been awhile, so time for a refresher anyway. We've fallen into a Thai Nakorn rut, so I tend to forget about Thai Bistro. But with Thai Nakorn on an extended summer holiday, we were motivated to come back and remember how pleasant it can be to sit out on the Bistro's patio when a breeze is blowing and there are no incompetent buskers about. This time I was particularly taken with the Panang Nuer, which was very different from other panangs I've had (more stew-like) and oh-so-flavorful. It wasn't hot (for you heat fanatics out there), but we didn't ask for hot. Service was prompt and friendly, as we've always experienced here. I think we'll just have to suck it up and eat Thai food more often so that we can frequent both Bistro and Nakorn. One caveat: We noticed a sign applying for a change in ownership. I'm not sure if that has already occurred yet or not. More reason to check back again. :-) —CovertProfessor

2010-07-18 13:04:24   when we came a couple months ago the food was good, but one chick was handling the whole floor and looked pretty harried. Things kinda lagged but the food was good! If cp was right then new ownership will probably shake things up —StevenDaubert

2010-10-21 20:54:46   If you want flavor, avoid this place. We ordered it "extra spicy," and it was the most bland Thai food we've ever tasted. —jsg718

2011-06-17 15:52:20   This is my favorite Thai restaurant. Anywhere. Davis seems to have a disproportionately large number of Thai restaurants so you probably have to be doing something right to survive. They're doing a lot right. When you're standing at the counter you can watch the kitchen and they always seem to be chopping up some fresh produce. You can see why in the picture of "Yum Duck" above. It seems pretty standard for their non curry dishes to feature a colorful array of fruits and veggies in an acidic dressing, served with whatever meat you chose. It's a safe place to get seafood and their GOONG SCALLOP KATIEM is particularly good. My favorite item here is the lamb kabob. It's the tenderest, juiciest lamb I've ever had and I love the two sauces it comes with. I don't normally like lamb, but when I do, I really like it. —MikeyCrews

2011-06-18 13:51:33   This has been my favorite place in Davis for Thai food since I moved here in 2006, but I don't think I'll be able to return after today. The food itself is tasty, the servers are friendly; it was the following experience that has taken this restaurant off my list.

The first negative was when my friend found a hair in her green curry. But we all agreed, hey, that happens. Then, during the same meal, my other friend found a piece of plastic in her mango chicken. Both of those things were forgivable (disregarding that they happened simultaneously, on a very slow evening). The final straw was today, when I heated up my leftovers: halfway through, I found an INSECT PART, probably the leg of a roach.

Needless to say, that's just unacceptable. I won't be going to Thai Bistro anymore. —LauraGYoung

• I think this place is good enough that I could tolerate up to 1/3 of a cockroach. —MikeyCrews
  

2011-07-19 13:41:42   Ate there for lunch and got yellow curry. Halfway through my meal, I find a LARGE HAIR. I showed the waitress and she did nothing about it, I told her I had a hard time paying for my lunch that I didn't get to finish and my friend didn't finish hers all well after seeing the GROSS HAIR, she has lost her appetite. She said 'hair happens, you have hair, I have hair, hair happens'. Yes but hair doesn't need to be happening in my food. Her hair was not tied up or even in a hair net. Looking on this site and yelp I have now found 5 posting about hair in food here. Don't go here unless you like Hairy Thai Food! —SharesHope