Review is no longer current. The restaurant changed owners and crew. The sauces are now bland and every dish tastes the same.

***** Old review. *****

Finding really good Thai restaurants in Oregon can be a bit difficult. Quite often you end up going from one extreme (all of the food is basically tasteless with differing degrees of hot) to another (the food tastes good but is so over presented and over priced that you are not really interested in coming back).

My wife and I had just about given up hope on eating out at any Asian restaurants in the greater Portland area when we decided to give this new place, Thai Roses Cuisine, a try one day. We were pleasantly suprised by the dishes, the service, and the prices so we went back again and tried some more. Now when we skip a couple of weeks the staff wants to know where we have been and what we have been doing.

We have worked our way through most of the menu and have enjoyed all of the dishes and every now and then we get an additional dish served to us when the chef is trying out something for a new special.

Our favourite dish, Mieng Kum, is a fun appetizer/salad. You pick up a large spinach leaf and fill it with ginger, onion, chile, peanuts, dried shrimp, lime, roasted coconut, and a bit of a sweet & tangy sauce and enjoy. The delicious mix of hot, sweet, salty, and sour is what keeps us going back for this dish on a fairly regular basis.

Other dishes we really like are:

• Banh Zeo - seasoned ground pork and vegetables wrapped in an omelet and served with a sweet plum sauce
• Tom Yum - spicy soup with meat/tofu and vegetables, flavoured with lemon grass, lime leaves, and galanga
• Kway Tiew - well seasoned noodle soup with sprouts, onions, peppers, and cilantro
• Yellow Curry - meat/tofu and vegetables stewed in a thick and rich curry sauce (ask for it to be served with Thai Jeeb (chicken &shrimp dumplings) instead of meat)
• Musmun Curry - meat/tofu and vegetables stewed in an peanut flavoured curry sauce
• Pad Ho Ra Pa - meat/tofu and vegetables stir fried with a Thai basil and fish sauce
• Spicy Lover - stir fried meat/tofu, bamboo shoots, carrots, onions, celery, bell peppers, in a spicy but not quite sweet chile sauce

The restaurant makes their own curries and chili sauces, and while they serve up a mild to medium heat dish if they do not know you, you can ask for more or less chile. If you are one of the more chile types like me, also ask for them to bring out the chile tray with your meal. The tray with chile oil, pickled chile sauce, mixed dried chiles, and soy sauce will only show up if you ask.