A Just A Sec Exclusive!
We sent Kathy, one of our volunteer restaurant reviewers, out to find a Thai lunch special near her workplace. She landed at Pooket at 945 Second Avenue at 50th Street.
She thought the lunch menu looked promising: 30 different items to choose from for $7.95, which included complementary soup of the day or house salad.
It was a bad experience from the moment Kathy walked in.
"The service was completely chaotic," she said. "It looked like there were two kids running around the dining room trying to do everything."
"First, they sat me down and forgot to give me a menu," she went on. "Eventually the waitress came back. I gave her a blank look, she looked at the empty table and said, 'Oh, you didn't get a menu yet?' Bad sign! Especially when a lot of people are in a hurry to get back to work at lunchtime. How hard is it to remember to give someone a menu when they sit down? I mean, shouldn't that be second nature for the hostess?"
"I couldn't believe it when the guy came with my salad and soup," said Kathy. "He literally threw the bowls on the table as he whizzed by." She also added, "I noticed the menu said you have your choice of soup or salad, but they gave me both. Were they too overworked or careless to bother asking, so they just gave everyone both? Or was that a menu typo? I'll never know."
And how were the soup and salad?
"They were both completely disgusting. Let me just say that I am not a picky eater. I will eat a lot of mediocre food when I'm hungry and not complain. But I took one bite of that disgusting salad and pushed the bowl away. If you'd been sitting there watching me, you'd clearly see how disgusted I was. I'm sure I made a total face."
"The salad was a meager portion of wet lettuce and a cucumber slice in a bowl without dressing. It tasted like something you'd eat out of the dumpster at the end of the day."
"The soup was like dishwater. Water with a vague hint of onion flavor, filled with limp pieces of cabbage, exactly three julienne slices of carrots the size of blades of thin grass, and exactly three squares of tofu."
As for the entree, Kathy kept it uncomplicated and ordered her favorite thing: classic Pad Thai with chicken. She knew what to expect, and had plenty of Pad Thai experiences to compare it with.
"I ate it. It tasted OK. But it was not the best Pad Thai I've ever had. No way. First of all, it was incredibly watery. The whole thing was sitting in a pool of broth, which is NOT how Pad Thai should be served."
She went on, "One of the things I love about Pad Thai is the different textures in your mouth of the smooth noodles and the fresh crunchy peanut crumbles. Pooket did one thing right -- they served the peanut crumbles on the side so you could put them on the noodles yourself and they wouldn't soak up the moisture before getting to the table. The problem was, the peanuts they served didn't taste freshly-chopped anyway. They arrived in a clump. Like they'd been stored for a while and the bits got all stuck together. I had to put the clump on top of the noodles, and break it apart with my fork. Not first-class Pad Thai."
"They were too busy to check on me during the meal, it seemed they were so understaffed and just wanted to throw bad food at you and get you out the door." "While I was eating, I noticed one customer across the room had a problem with his check. It seemed he was charged too much. And a guy at the table next to me at one point was calling out, 'Excuse me! Excuse me!' Then he turned to his friends and said, 'Nobody's looking!' So I don't think I was the only one who was unhappy."
So Kathy, how was the decor?
"The place was really shabby. I was surprised. I haven't seen a place that bad in a while. (The upholstery in) almost every booth was ripped to pieces, and they repaired them with so much black tape it was ridiculous. One booth had black tape going all the way up the side."
"It seems like Pooket has been trying to cut costs for a long time with the bad condition of the dining room. Taping up their booths, please! I don't know how long they've been passing off the poor ingredients in the food, but I think Pooket is suffering the effects of the economy, and they're passing the suffering on to the customer. I will never go there again." A note from the editorial department: we went to the Pooket web site address as printed on their take-out menu and found the account had "been suspended". Does this lend muscle to Kathy's theory that Pooket is trying to cut expenses? Web site account suspended, restaurant understaffed, pathetic ingredients and meager portions? We couldn't help but wonder.
Just to play devil's advocate here: Kathy, it was $7.95, for an entree, soup and salad. What do you expect?
"I've been working in New York for a long time. I've been to a lot of places. There are plenty of places with that kind of lunch special, where the food is decent. I can't believe Pooket gets away with being so bad when they have so much competition."
Kathy added this excellent point: "...getting a free soup and salad isn't a great value if what you're getting is tasteless shit that won't stick to your ribs, makes you want to hurl, and you'll probably not eat it anyway. What are you getting for free? Garbage. You're getting water and a couple of water-logged vegetables as thin as paper. So you've just paid $7.95 for mediocre food, when you could've walked down the block and found five other places who will feed you something decent for that much, or less."
In midtown east, when you're craving Thai, skip Pooket. You work hard for the money -- get fed by people who care about your satisfaction and your business.
