Title: White Lotus Thai
Author: jean komatsu
Last saved by: ENU

White Lotus Thai in Albany, CA – update, dinner
Review date: January 2012
(previous reviews appended below)

On our return from a day trip to Sonoma County, we stopped by White Lotus Thai to pick up take-out for dinner. When we were here for a second lunch on October 2012, their noodle dishes seemed good although not exceptional, and Inez had liked the mango fried rice we'd brought her from our initial visit August 2012 (although nothing else on that August visit was worth ordering again). 

We chose the mango fried rice with shrimp, along with the spicy White Lotus noodles with beef, and a Pad Thai with prawns. We also got a dish of the boneless roast duck with spinach and 'special sauce'.

Sadly, this time the White Lotus noodles had a flat heat with little complexity. The Pad Thai did use baby beansprouts, which was a nice touch that more restaurants should emulate, but although we were happy to see that it was more brown than red (indicating less ketchup), it wasn't any more interesting than its cousin. Both were decent in the "I don't want to cook tonight so let's grab something around the corner" category, but no higher than that Grade C level.

The duck was mediocre. Mostly skin and gristle, although the spinach was fresh. The sauce was a weak echo of red cooking sauce, the classic Chinese cooking sauce that has spread all over Asia and Southeast Asia with regional variants.

Inez enjoyed her fried rice, however, and they were fairly generous with the shrimp. But overall, White Lotus is generic dumbed-down Thai. Even in the East Bay, there are better alternatives. Maybe on our October lunch, we lucked out on a different cook than who we got this time. Either way, two bad out of three isn't good enough to win a return visit again.

Three people, take-out/dinner: one rice dish, two noodle dishes, one meat/vegetable dish, was $46.

White Lotus Thai in Albany, CA – update, lunch
Review date: October 2012
(previous review appended below)

Carlos and I stopped in to try lunch again. Our first visit had given us a mediocre meal of oversweetened starters. Only the mango fried rice proved satisfactory. But we noticed everyone else was ordering plates of noodles, so we decided to give them another chance and 'go with the flow'. Most of the noodle dishes offer a choice of different meats, so we could vary things up between the two of us.

Because the food the first time was so bland, I asked for extra-hot. Carlos wanted to go medium-hot, and I should have listened to him! The kitchen made it all so incendiary we could barely eat it, LOL. 

Carlos wanted to try the po tak soup, a spicy sour soup with mixed seafood. Outside of the excess of chile peppers, the po tak was great. Nothing elaborate about the broth, just a lot of fresh lime juice, but the seafood was generous and very gently cooked. There were big chunks of clean-tasting catfish, calamari, large sweet shrimp, slices of fish cake, and good-sized ocean scallops. Next time we'll ratchet it down to medium-hot, but this is definitely a soup we will want again.

He picked the White Lotus noodles with shrimp. These are the thinner rice noodles (not rice vermicelli, but more like a narrow linguine). The White Lotus Noodles were a big hit with Carlos – except for the super-hot chile level! This has the salty-sweet taste he likes, with more salty than sweet, instead of the other way around as it is at too many places. There were green onions in it, but not too many that he couldn't pick them out quickly.

I chose the Pad Kee Mao, which is the thicker, fresh bak fun rice noodles, selecting beef as my meat of choice. The Pad Kee Mao was very tasty, although we think the White Lotus Noodles are a touch better. The Pad Kee Mao was more one-dimensional in flavor, but I very much liked the addition of a handful of fried basil sprigs. They added a nice flavor to the noodles, along with the massive amount of garlic. 

All in all, we decided this is a decent noodle and soup place. Skip the regular menu, and you'll be well satisfied with White Lotus' food.

Two people, lunch: one soup, two entrees, and three Thai iced teas – we needed something to offset the chile burn! With tip, $49.

White Lotus Thai
843 San Pablo Ave., Albany, CA
www.whitelotusalbany.com
Review date: August 2012

We arrived at Nizza La Bella's door, only to find they weren't serving dinner for another thirty minutes. We started walking around and were caught by the lavish photographs and extensive menu at this Thai eatery. We took a seat in the simple but nicely decorated dining room. 

The menu is so extensive we had a hard time deciding what to order. We finally decided to order half-a-dozen small plates for ourselves, and a fried rice entree as takeout for Inez, who had stayed home this evening. We ordered:

Spicy White Lotus Wings: fried chicken wings sauteed with chili-garlic sauce, topped with deep-fried basil leaves. The "sauce" was a glaze, overly sweetened and applied to overcooked battered chicken wings. The basil was Italian, the Genovese type, not Thai basil. This was a "coulda" dish – if it hadn't been overcooked and oversugared, it could have been a winner. But it wasn't.

White Lotus Fresh Rolls: the same kind of fresh ricepaper-wrapped rolls with lettuce and mint, shrimp and rice vermicelli, that we're all familiar with at Vietnamese restaurants. The peanut sauce was made with chopped peanuts and red chile sauce. No peanut butter, which was a nice change.

Thai Fish Cake: very thin cakes although they are nicely seasoned. We prefer the fish cakes at Siam Bay/Oakland. Their thicker fishcake gives a better taste of the fish mixture, instead of just the fried crust. The accompanying 'cucumber salad' had a generous amount of cucumbers and onion slivers, but once again it was heavily sweetened. 

Corn Cake: perfectly round corn fritters. If Asians would use better quality frozen corn instead of the mediocre canned corn they're so fond of, this starter would be so much better. It was a fairly tasty batter, and the deep frying wasn't bad. But you just can't do much with starchy indifferent yellow corn, no matter how you try to disguise it.

Pork Jerky: strips of pork, marinated and deep-fried. Unfortunately, they were, like the chicken wings, overcooked and dry. They are served with unadulterated Sriracha sauce. We didn't like the pork much, and the sauce didn't improve any aspect of it.

Deep-fried preserved duck eggs (thousand year-old eggs) with ground meat and fried basil: Carlos and Inez love these eggs. I'm indifferent to them – I only find them tasty when I'm convalescing, for some reason. This preparation sounded so odd I insisted on ordering it for Carlos. 

Despite the menu's claim of "stuffed duck eggs", they are nothing of the sort. The eggs are halved, lightly battered and deep-fried, then placed around a pile of cooked ground pork with the fried leaves scattered lightly over eveything. Carlos called this a waste of good "black eggs". We brought it home to add it to congee. We wouldn't bother ordering this again.

Overall we were disappointed in White Lotus Thai's appetizers. However, the mango fried rice with shrimp that we ordered for Inez and took home, turned out to be quite good. We were honestly surprised by this, as fried rice is not generally one of our favorite things unless it's the classic chicken and salted fish (what the Japanese call hamyu) version. 

We noticed that other diners were ordering the noodle plates, so we will try to return to White Lotus for some of the more basic dishes and see if our opinion of it improves. 

Two people, with additional take-out for one, dinner: six starters, one rice plate, with tip was $75.