SPICE Foray

Last weekend was a wonderful weekend as I took a brief trip to NYC for a friend’s b-day. As we all know festivities must involve good food. For the purpose of conciseness I will focus on the best of my food experiences, SPICE. Spice is a Thai restaurant and suggestion of Zagat and some local friends. I was game since Thai is an area of Asian food that I’ve yet to truly experience. Although there are numerous locations around Montreal, we chose the one closest to our friend’s place, i.e. Upper East Side. As we walked through the door I had no real expectations. The place was dim, very dim. The decor was your usual NYC fair, modern, a bold colour, and sleek accessories. Nothing seemed too special. All that changed once we opened the menu and saw..........reasonable prices!

Starters:
We were hungry, well a bit beyond hungry since it took us longer to get to this point than we had planned. So the late diner and later partying meant we needed to eat a good meal. Let’s get to the appetizers. Four of the five ordered appetizers and all of them were more than ample. I went for the dumplings. After a recent foray than ended in food failure, I was longing for a non-pork dumpling. Yes!!, call answered; for 4$ I enjoyed the Nabon Steamed Dumplings: chicken shrimp dumplings with black bean-vinaigrette sauce

The sauce was sweet but not overpowering. I was in heaven and really did not want to share! The dumpling itself was not too salty and was actually quite filling (I had six, and exchanged two for a taste of the Curry Puff, Calamari (5$), and Spring Rolls). The calamari was the best after the dumplings. They were nicely fried and went brilliantly with the sweet chilli sauce. Although they were said to be spicy, it was just a slight spice.

Mains:



After finishing my appetizer and helping Courtney along with hers, we moved on to our main. I chose Pad Thai (9$). As common as this dish is, I’ve never actually tried it. I do think I chose the right time to try the dish because I ate until I could no longer stand it!! The portion was mammoth so getting to that point was easy. I had a never ending plate! I was enamoured with the slightly sweet sauce, the noodles, the chicken, and the way the peanuts took a back seat and worked alongside the other ingredients. I ate myself into a food coma....



And then went on partied my way out of it!!! .

PS: As a group of 5 they added an 18% gratuitiy to our check, kinda sneaky in my opinion as that usually applies to groups of six or more. Also they were quite hesitant to give us our change and assumed it was additional tip!