Thai Pavilion II Offers a Buffet of Blandness

Thai Pavilion II boasts of having the most authentic Thai food in the Chicago area, but it only really offers mediocre cuisine. While it’s not bad, the Skokie offshoot of the DeKalb-based restaurant is unimpressive, especially when you can get much better food for a similar price so close by.

The spot at 4654 Church St. serves up an $8.95 weekend brunch buffet so my party stopped by around noon Sunday to check it out. The interior was nicely decorated with white tablecloth-covered tables, Thai sculptures atop the booths and photos of flowers and images from Thailand along the walls. A flat-screen TV was tuned to cartoons.

The place was pretty quiet, with the only other occupants being a large family celebrating an infant’s birthday and one guy dining solo. Even so, service wasn’t particularly fast. Our server gave us menus in case we wanted to order a la carte, but it took her a bit to come back to take our orders.

I asked if the food on the buffet was spicy and was told it wasn’t. So I asked if kitchen could make something hotter. We were told it wouldn’t do that, but we could add some extra spice from sauces offered at the buffet.

 We ordered up the appetizer mix ($12.95) and one of my friends got pad thai ($7.95). After another wait, the waitress came back to let us know that the appetizers would take a while but she could bring the pad thai out sooner, presumably because the restaurant had been stocking it for the buffet.

When my friend’s pad thai came out, we headed for the buffet. While it had plenty of options in theory, in reality a lot of the food had been well picked over. The pad thai had been recently restocked and there was a solid amount of Thai fried rice ($6.95). So we could pile up our plates with it, but there wasn’t much left of the vegetable egg rolls ($4.95 a la carte), pad kee mow ($7.95 a la carte), spicy eggplant ($8.95 a la carte) and other dishes.

The pad thai was the best thing we tried. But that might have been affected by the fact that it was the only thing that was hot--everything else was fairly lukewarm. The noodles were sweet but not too sugary. The fried rice was fairly bland, with the only hints of flavor coming from the bits of raisins, corn and carrots. The egg rolls were fine but nothing special, with the vegetables inside a little on the mushy side.

I tried using the chili paste to spice up the pad kee mow, but it really just made the noodles fairly watery without adding any more flavor. Nothing was good enough to make me or my boyfriend interested in a return trip to the buffet.

The appetizer mix offered plenty of options but nothing stood out. The platter came with three pieces each of potstickers, chicken satay, egg rolls, shrimp in blankets, crab rangoon, fried wontons and shumai along with a bowl of cucumber salad and a triad of dipping sauces. While the chicken satay featured well-cooked thin strips of chicken, the peanut sauce was a thick bland paste. The sauce was better for the potstickers, but the dumplings were nothing special. The crab rangoon had too much cream cheese and the shrimp in blankets and fried wontons were largely just fried dough with bits of meat.

Again it took a while for our server to notice we wanted the check and come by with it and boxes for our leftovers. The price just made us more disappointed with the overall experience and wishing we’d have eaten at Tub Tim Thai.