A few weekends ago, I took a bit of a food adventure with a couple of friends from high school into Quincy. I’ve been trying to get better at hanging with my friends before I start getting swamped with school work and start holing myself in my home office. So any weekend I can go out with them, even more so during the semester, is a definite plus.
My friends and I are not from Quincy, though one of them does go in the area from time to time to see some of their other friends. But, there’s nowhere I won’t go for a fun night out. The only downside to our night was when we got there.
The Thai Noodle Bar in Quincy is a bit of a hole-in-the-wall if you compare it to what you read in its reviews. I hadn’t looked this place up beyond the reviews of the place, and so—and even my friends admitted to this—we all had a much different image of this place than that which it was: Darker. Bigger. Crowded.
There’s something magical about the hype that this place gets that seems to draw for you a very different image of itself compared to that which you walk into. I don’t mean that in a bad way, though. I have enough of an open mind that the quality of the food here was not diminished for this fact.
Eventually, we got over that and it was just like being at any other restaurant on your list. There’s only a handful of tables and a booth along the side of one part of the restaurant. The bathroom is clean as well. But everything I am currently saying might be stirring in you another image than what you might want entirely. I have a pretty low standard for when I go out. If the bathrooms are clean and the food is good, I’m already happy with the place.
When it’s busy enough, you might have to remind the waitress or cashier with a little bit of eye contact that you’re ready to order, but that’s my only quip about the place. We only had to wait about 15 minutes, give or take, between menus and deciding before putting in our order. But it eventually became evident after the fifth person within this range of time coming in and then out exactly what sort of a restaurant this was: delivery and take-out with optional seating.
Our food came in less time than it took us to wait. And the portions are sizable enough one could easily take theirs home as leftovers. I went boring and had the usual Crispy Chicken Pad Thai I tend to go for with these places. Nevertheless, it was really good and I had nothing left to take home with me.
My friends both had soup and were more adventurous than I was for what I was calling our night out. One had pink milk and a beef noodle bowl with a rich, creamy broth that had them full before they could see the bottom, and the other a Thai Iced Tea and mushroom-based miso-type soup.
While none of us got anything spicy, I will leave here one tip I found in many of the reviews of this place prior to going here. If you ask for spicy, you are going to get spicy.
Another tip I learned there was about the drinks. Drinks like their lemonade are super thick and super sweet. I’ve lost my sweet tooth since growing up at least a little bit. So that one was hard to get through, enough to where I ended up just leaving it half-drunk at the end. Their coconut milk is definitely at least fresh though, judging by the seemingly fresh crate of coconuts at the counter. Could I have a lovely bunch of coconuts, anyone?