3.5, but I'll give it a 4…read more
Takara -- ThaiSushi with personality (and a few rules you need to learn fast).
First, this place is busy. If my dining room shot looks oddly empty, that's because I was explicitly told not to photograph people. Apparently someone recently went full creep mode taking pictures of diners and had to be removed by police. So yes--AI cleanup it is. I'm here for dinner, not a misdemeanor.
Now, the food.
The chef-owners are from Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand, and that absolutely comes through. This isn't your standard Americanized Thai-Sushi mashup. They claim to make many of their curry pastes in-house, and based on what we tasted, I believe it.
But before you order, you need to understand how this place works:
*Vegetables are cooked softer than most Asian kitchens
*Spice is opt-in only -- if you don't ask, you're getting no chile
*Levels are blunt: nothing / medium / hot / Thai hot
*Even at "nothing," you're still getting fish sauce--so there's baseline funk
*The crowd leans older, local, and very much the boating set--which explains some of these defaults
We started with soups:
The tom kha gai is excellent, but not the creamy coconut-heavy version most people expect. This leans closer to a tom yum with a touch of coconut milk--lighter, sharper, hot/sour/sweet, and very drinkable.
The wonton soup--house-made chicken wontons in a clean vegetable broth--was simple and very well executed.
Then things got uneven.
The spicy herb noodle (tofu, medium) is listed as egg noodle with egg, chili paste, vegetables, and curry powder--but what actually shows up is closer to a yellow curry noodle stir-fry hybrid.
The flavor is excellent. The chili paste + curry powder combination gives it real depth--warm, slightly sweet, properly spiced.
But the default egg noodle is a problem. It comes out completely overcooked--soft to the point of collapse. When I asked, I was told that's just how it is.
They also ignored the "no bell pepper" request.
Which is frustrating, because the base is strong enough that this could be one of the best dishes on the menu.
The obvious fix:
order it with flat rice noodles instead
So we pivoted.
The drunken noodle (Pad Kee Mao) with flat rice noodles (tofu, no bell pepper--this time honored) was much better structurally and just as flavorful.
But it's worth noting: this isn't a textbook pad kee mao.
It eats closer to a pad see ew with heat--slightly sweeter, less aggressive on basil and aromatics--but with a noticeable chile kick. At medium, it was actually spicier than the spicy herb noodle.
Still, this was the better noodle dish overall.
The massaman curry was the service hiccup. It first arrived as chicken instead of beef. They insisted I ordered it that way--which, no--but they did remake it.
And it delivered.
The curry is clearly not from a paste jar--layered, slightly sweet, and consistent with everything else we had. There's a mild sweetness across the menu, but it's controlled. Next time I'd go hotter than medium.
Final take:
Takara isn't sloppy--it's idiosyncratic.
This reads like Thai food filtered through a Burmese lens--softer, slightly sweeter, less aggressive on herbs, with chile doing more of the work than aromatics.
There's a real kitchen here doing legit work, but the execution depends heavily on how you order. Defaults are tuned for a conservative crowd, not for precision or intensity.
If you order casually, you may leave frustrated.
If you direct the experience--protein, noodle type, spice level, exclusions--you'll eat very well.
Would I go back? Yes.
Would I be more explicit next time? Absolutely.
