Tei Too, Webster Groves, Visited October 2017

It was my pick for lunch and I decided to pick almost the same place we visited last Saturday. If you look at the photo above the Tei Too restaurant is where we visited today. The yellow place next to it is the Webster Wok where we dined last Saturday. We also parked almost exactly where we did last week, directly on the South side of Big Bend. There is also a large lot just to the south of the restaurants, but I did not realize that until later.

The interior of the restaurant was pretty nice. There was a nice tapestry on the wall, and the menu was written up on a large board behind a counter in the back. You order at the counter and they bring the food to your table. You also self serve drinks with a soda fountain available at the side. The dining area was definitely a lot nicer than the Webster Wok next door. My wife did notice the only artificial sweeetener they had was saccharin. She always prefers using something that is not a known carcinogen.

We ordered crab rangoons, an order of pad thai and red curry with chicken. We waited at a booth and did not have to wait long until the crab rangoons appeared. The strange thing was, they did not look like crab rangoons, but more like thin egg rolls. Sure enough where we broke them open they had cream cheese and crab inside and they were actually not bad, but not what we were expecting as crab rangoons. The Webster Wok crab rangoons were actually much better. Too bad we did not get an order next door and brought them to the nicer booth at Tei Too.

Crab Rangoons? Look more like Crab Rolls to me

The pad thai and the red curry appeared not much later than the crab rolls. We soon noticed that the pad thai that was listed as "not spicy" included a pile of cruched peanuts with it that had red pepper mixed throughout it. So if you wanted the peanuts added in you were getting a bunch of hot red pepper too. That definitely did not leave the dish as "not spicy". When we tasted the pad thai we noticed is tasted differently that most other places. It was too sour as if the sauce was not cooked enough. Neither my wife nor my mother-in-law was very impressed with it.

My red curry was actually not too bad. They did not give you much rice, but I did dump all of it in with the curry and thought is was pretty good, but still not as good as the places on the Loop. They included some weird tasting tough leafy vegetable in their version which I did not want to eat. I know the ones on the Loop sure do not have that. The flavor otherwise was pretty good, although they were lacking a bit in chicken. It was hot but lacked as much other curry flavor as I have tasted in others. Overall it was not bad but not as good as it could have been.

So the overall impression was not bad until it came to... the food! Unfortunately, the food flavor is a pretty important part of the reason you go out to eat. We were hoping to find a new good Thai restaurant that was more convenient than having to deal with the Loop or South Grand.or even Clayton. The search will have to continue...

Food Quality (what really matters)