Omnivore - Lunch at Top Spice
Once a novelty, now usual
- Cliff Bostock’s iPhone
- Pad Thai at Top Spice
Lunch today was at Top Spice on Piedmont Road. This restaurant, one of three in a local chain, serves Thai and Malaysian food. The Toco Hills location drew very positive reviews after it opened around 2001. The AJC named it the best Thai restaurant in Atlanta at one point.
Since Thai restaurants have appeared everywhere since then, Top Spice has ceased to be very novel. And another restaurant, Penang, features far more Malaysian dishes.
With a few exceptions like beef rendang, the lunch menu is the usual list of Thai dishes like pad Thai, which two of us ordered today. It’s made with fresh-tasting pieces of scrambled eggs, shrimp that actually taste like shrimp, and tofu scattered over a huge mound of rice noodles tossed in a slightly sweet sauce. There were far too few bean sprouts to provide the crunch that the other soft textures demanded. And I don’t know where the ground peanuts were.
Lunch gets you soup for no additional cost — creamy coconut milk with bits of tofu today. One friend ordered beef satay, a generous portion that I didn’t taste but he enjoyed.