The best Thai in New York?

With my new role at work I’ll be making more frequent trips to New York to collaborate with my colleagues out there.  Rough life – I know!  My most recent time in the city a couple weeks ago was filled with lots of productive meetings, fun with coworkers, and, of course, fantastic food.

The culinary highlight of the trip was a visit to Kin Shop, a new Thai restaurant opened in October by Harold Dieterle, the winner of Top Chef – Season One.  I’m a huge Top Chef fan, so this was very exciting, and the fact that it was Thai, moderately priced, and had garnered some fantastic reviews by critics and the general public made this a no-brainer.  The dinner was a fun time with friends, we got to see Harold expediting from the kitchen, and famed food critic Jeffrey Steingarten was seated two tables away from us!  I still haven’t read a review, but I hope he enjoyed his meal as much as I did.

I cannot recommend this restaurant enough, and if you have the chance to go, take a lot of people so you can try as many of the dishes as possible.  We feasted on the following items:

• spicy duck laab salad – the spiciest thing I’ve eaten outside of Thailand, authentic flavors, delicious
• fried pork and crispy oyster salad – so good, pork belly, oysters, you can’t really go wrong
• grilled “Phuket style” river prawns – cooked perfectly with a sweet peanut pepper sauce that I could have drank straight
• hand cut beef tartar – tasty chili jam, this was nice, but not extraordinary
• red curry roasted duck breast –served on roti, I could eat this all day, they do duck well!
• green curry steamed red snapper – this was cooked perfectly and was light but with a very complimentary sauce
• pan fried crab noodles – thin noodles with tons of flavor, were a nice complement to the curry-flavored dishes
• massaman braised goat – you have to work at this one since it’s served on the bone, but that just makes for some great marrow (thanks Orchid for sharing!)
• lychee sorbet – perfect, refreshing, could eat a quart
• calamansi sorbet – ditto
• kaffir lime ice cream – I had my eye on this as soon as the reservation was set, nothing is quite like makrut (kaffir) lime, and it’s one of my favorite flavors ever.  This ice cream was perfect, flavorful yet not too strong, and I can’t wait to try to make it at home

Check out the full menu, and for an even better review, check out my friend Orchid’s post on Yelp.

Other highlights of the trip included an amazing lamb burger and some hard-to-find (at least in Indy) top-notch beers at Amity Hall.  Delirium Tremens, Bluepoint Sour Cherry Imperial Stout, Brooklyn Brewmaster Cuvee Noire, and Bluepoint Toasted Lager all were outstanding (and on tap!).

The final highlight – meeting the co-founder of reddit at our office (they like us!).  Yep, I’m a Thai-loving, sometimes foodie, geeky beer snob who works for an awesome nonprofit! Cheers!