‘A contender straight off the bat’: Mee Thai, Bold Street, reviewed

There’s rarely many surprises in store when you go to a Thai restaurant, and that to me is part of their appeal.

They might have house specialties, the odd outlier and the occasional admission to some current trend, but really you know what you’re getting yourself in for, and crucially what you want to eat. 

We’ve all got our favourites, the dishes we do every time, carrying around a mental bingo card of ‘Best Pad Thai’s I’ve eaten’, ‘The Laab League Table’, ‘The Tom Yam World Cup’.

It’s an ongoing process, a constantly shifting hierarchy of what hits every time, what hits hardest, and what wasn’t quite the same last time around. 

So when a new Thai place opens I tend to make a point of going, and tend to order along familiar lines. When Mee Thai opened on Bold Street just before Christmas, it went straight on the list.

Once the site of Jimmy’s, the live music venue and bar, the space is well suited to a light and spacious restaurant, with an open kitchen now where the bar one was. I love seeing my pint being poured as much as the next person, but not as much as seeing my dinner dance around a wok in real time. 

The glass front affords a view out onto The Bombed Out Church and the bustle of Renshaw and Berry Street, and it also affords passersby a view inside, as I discovered mid-slurp of a Tom Yum soup. It beats a billboard I guess. 

The space is festooned with all sorts of vibrant decoration, colour and characterful signs and posters nodding to home. In other hands it could’ve perhaps been overblown and a little kitsch, a Disnified take on Thailand, but I find it charming and very inviting.

I took a seat on a high stool by the window and and had a glance at the set lunch deal, a preposterously generous two courses for £12, and while I’m always on the lookout to try fixed lunch deals (in the interests of our readers, of course), this time I needed to see Mee Thai’s take on a few different things (again, of course, in the interest of our readers).

First up, always and forever, Tom Yum soup (£7.95). I’ve been stung on this a few times, and will no doubt be stung again in the future, but it does us well to live in the present with an open mind. I’ll take any excuse really. I ordered it with chicken and a pint of Pattaya (£5.95). 

This was not shy on the chilli, which kicked me halfway down Bold Street but is described on the scale as ‘tingly’ (1/3). So I’d imagine ‘spicy’ (3/3) transports you to the astral plane. A real forehead-dabber. If I came in with a cold I definitely didn’t leave with one. A fantastic rendition and an ideal start to things.

Alongside the soup I ordered the crispy wontons with chicken and prawn (£6.25 for six). Deep-fried to a glassy sharpness, crunchy and well-seasoned but succulent inside, they made fantastic use of that combination of filling that can seem a little strange to some - fish and fowl - but which I love for its fatty and tangy character. A good addition to starters if you’ve got company, but if you try and battle through all six by yourself I won’t judge.

For mains I chose something that is, in fact, included on the lunch deal; Pad Pak Moo Krob, or belly pork with stir fried spring greens, oyster sauce, garlic and chilli (£13.50). The veg was plentiful - cabbage, pak choi, broccoli, peppers, baby corn, bean sprouts, peas - and gave me that vague sense of smugness that comes from eating something with more than one green thing in it. And at lunchtime to boot. 

The belly pork was perfectly done I would say; crispy on top, fatty in the middle, tender at the bottom. Little seasoning was needed thanks to the broth of oyster sauce that it all swam in, which when soaked into the broccoli was gorgeous. An easy way to eat your greens, and if you order it on the lunch deal you’re basically pulling a heist on the place. Very good indeed.

A good salad on the side is in my opinion one of the things Thai food does so well. In the west we tend to see salads as some sort of penance, a hair shirt to be donned after enjoying yourself over Christmas (shame on you). Either that or we make them all creamy and sack off any health benefits, at which point I just say order what you want to and seek confession later. 

Southeast Asian salads meanwhile are bright, full of variety and punchier than most other cuisines’ main dishes, so are always worth a pop. Once again, I’ve had some shocking papaya salads and I’ve had some fantastic ones, it’s all in the sauce if you ask me. Drown it in oceans of fish sauce for all I care, you’d struggle to have too much of the stuff in there. Besides, you can always balance it out with lime. Mee Thai’s Som Tum Thai (£9.95) was fragrant, limey, tangy and hit all the notes you’d want it to. I just would have added more fish sauce.

It’s never easy to come into what can be a crowded market, in a city with a wealth of Southeast Asian restaurants on offer, and stand up on your own merits. Mee Thai, as the new spot on the block, does a sterling job. It’s a contender straight off the bat, unafraid to give you Thai food as they know you’ll like it, spice levels and all. In the Tom Yam World Cup, it’s through to the knockout stages.

Mee Thai, 130 Bold Street, L1 4JA