"This place doesn't look very good," exclaimed a veteran member of my dining posse as we crawled into Talent Thai after a hard day's night of gallery hopping across town in Chelsea. Indeed, even the location on the lower slopes of Murray Hill was all wrong for one of the city's best Thais, which usually pop up in places like Elmhurst and Hell's Kitchen. Talent Thai is part of a formidable new restaurant row that has developed on East 34th Street between Second and Third avenues in the past few years, a stretch that also includes a superb Turkish café (Ali Baba) and a crowd-pleasing Peruvian chain rotisserie (Pio Pio).
Talent Thai is deep and narrow, and clad in kitsch: Silvery artificial leaves flutter on deep brown walls, a line of seated Buddhas smile in a niche, and spindly orchids decorate tables so small that, if you order more than one dish per person, you're going to experience some teetering and maybe some spillage. As you wait longer than you should for your food to arrive, you can't help but notice delivery guys sprinting up the center of the restaurant on the way to their bikes outside, seeking the luxury high-rises that ring the site like a deformed sphincter. Never mind: The food on the aggressively pan-Thai menu is worth whatever wait you have to endure.
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