Sala Thai

Restaurant Review

Anecdotes & Analysis

A charming cottage (once, interestingly, the home of Lee Harvey Oswald) has a pair of small indoor dining rooms and a much bigger screened-porch dining area. All this is given over to serving lovers of Thai food who manage to find the place, which is well-hidden on a side street in the quaint Covington downtown. The menu here is ambitious as Thai places go, with some four dozen dishes that encompass not only the familiar curries and noodle dishes, but also some offbeat, herbal creations using lots of fresh herbs and convincing spice levels (at least if you let the cook know you want it “Thai spicy”). Start with the fresh roll stuffed with shrimp, porkl and noodles, the spicy shrimp soup, or the squid or steak salads. After satyisfying the Thai-deprived taste for green curry and pad Thai on early visits, one can sample the fresh ginger chicken, pork, or beef, the very peppery phad prik with hot chili peppers, or the several very juicy bowlls of seafood in various broths. All of this is as delicious as it is unusual. The Thai Pot is still new, but its food is already consistent. It just needs a few more customers to find the place. At the moment, they have the North Shore Thai market all to themselves.

Why It's Essential

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Backstory

A cottage in the downtown of Covington has a good-sized enclosed deck attached to it, and that facility has served a string of restaurants over the years. It's a pleasant place to dine, and has an interesting bit of ancient history: Lee Harvey Oswald lived here briefly about a year before he became infamous. The Thai Pot has been serving more-than-decent Thai food in this cottage for a number of years. Now and then it shows brilliance, particularly at dinner, when big bowls of juicy Thai curries carry a lot of flavor and (if you ask) a lot of heat. Some of the specials--particularly those involving seafood--are well above the local norm in both excellence and price. They do an especially good job with whole fish, braised with lots of fresh herbs and sauces that are as light in texture as they are intense in flavor. On the other hand, you'll get the occasional tepid fried spring roll at lunch, second-rate ingredients (green-lipped mussels, for example) here and there, and service that's so rapid that it almost seems as if they're trying to run you out of the place. I can understand this at lunch, when a lot of the customers come from the courthouse. But at dinner, it's necessary to ask the servers to slow down. The restaurant was established before the recent multiplication in the number of Thai eateries in Covington. Four new ones have opened since the storm, competing favorably for the Thai-dining crowd. But the Thai Pot retains many loyal regular customers, whose enthusiasm for the food is a touch over the top.