Food Review Thai Sabai

Does Leeds' award winning Thai restaurant still deserve such high praise? Ben Johnson pays them a visit

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Judging by the diners at Headingley’s tiny Thai Sabai, of which there are many (even at the height of the country’s snowmageddon), it quickly becomes apparent that this isn’t just your standard student fly-by enterprise. The fact that noisy fancy-dress bar Arc is just over the road, not to mention a succession of cheap sandwich shops and off licenses, doesn’t seem to affect the restaurant’s main clientele: mature, wine-swilling foodies who know a good Tom Yum when they see one. Although earlier on in the night, students can be found frequenting the early bird menu and making the most out of their takeaway service.

Thai Sabai have earned their reputation over three years of authentic oriental cooking, but at a time when places like Jino’s and Sukhothai can be found boasting the same rhetoric all within walking distance, the team at Thai Sabai have had to up the stakes a little. How? Well, they don’t seem to be pandering to our uneducated western palettes for one, and they promise not to inject your food with that most glistening of fluorescent chemical compounds: MSG, or monosodium glutamate to those in the lab coats.

MSG is sweet and sticky and just about everywhere at the moment, particularly in Leeds’ troughs of all-you-can-eat Chinese, but it has even started to creep into the more reputable firms. You won’t find it here, though - all ingredients are freshly prepared, beautifully fragrant and damn healthy, and go a long way to proving why Thai food has vastly out favoured Chinese cuisine in recent years. This might also have something to do with the relative ease that British tourists can travel to Thailand given the advent of increasingly cheaper flights, and the subsequent appetite to take a taste of your vacation home.

We enjoy starters of tod man pla (£3.95) - spicy fish cakes - and gung jeud wonsent (£3.95), a simple chicken broth with green veg and fine noodles. They’re both light and feathered with garnish, not to mention accompanied with Thai crackers and chilli dip. Even those with a limited knowledge of Thai food should recognise the country’s love of herbs and spices, twisting curry recipes with things like coconut milk and plenty of chilli. Such distinctive flavours are synonymous with their most staple dish, gang kiew wan, or Thai green curry (£7.95). It’s sublime and full of flavour; fruity, light but with a kick. Negotiate with them beforehand if you don’t want it to blow your head clean off, and they’ll make you something cooler.

But what we really want to talk about is their ‘weeping tiger’ dish (£8.95), not just because of its alluring name, or the fact that it is listed under the heading ‘recommendations’, but because it’s one of the tastiest meals you’ll find in a Thai restaurant in Leeds. Succulent slices of char grilled rump steak is drizzled with a mouth-watering chilli sauce (which I later discover has taken hours to prepare) and all to quite remarkable effect. Such a fabulous dish encourages me to try another Thai specialty, the desert of baked custard (£3.25), which can only be described as a soggy bread and butter pudding - an acquired taste, perhaps, but not totally inedible.

Quaint and effortlessly relaxed, those Headingley students just don’t know how lucky they are.

Posted on Wednesday 20th January 2010

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