The food and service at Isaan Der were outstanding. I appreciated that they were able to customize some of our orders, e.g. having the vegetables just blanched and plain with sauces on the side. Everything we tried was delicious. The server was very polite, nice, and got all of our orders correct (including all the customizations).
Ambiance was casual. The interior was a bit dark and modern, with dark blue and purple lights, a bar at the front, and a large screen playing a video of Thai street food being made in the streets of Bangkok.
The first page of the menu contained a snippet on the chef / owner's life story, her journey from Thailand to Canada, and how she went from being a journalist in Thailand to a chef and restauranteur in Toronto. I always like reading success stories and learning about the people working behind the dishes we eat.
1) Stir-Fried Morning Glory - This was listed under "small dishes", but the portion size was shareable as a side vegetable dish. They were able to make it just stir-fried without the fermented bean paste and chilli. It was already flavourful without any of the sauces.
2) Pad Pak (stir-fried broccoli, cauliflower, snap peas, carrot, bell pepper) - We requested for the vegetables to be blanched plain, without the oyster sauce. It was perfect - vegetables were still crisp, not over-cooked at all. We chose shrimps as the protein to go with the vegetables.
3) Pla Piing (Thai-style grilled European sea bass marinated with aromatic herbs and spices) - This was delicious and grilled to perfection. We also asked for this dish to be made with sauce on the side, and found that we didn't need the sauce at all. The sea bass meat was soft and flavourful.
4) Crab Fried Rice with Omelette - We came here specifically for this dish, as I had seen photos of it online and it looked good. It tasted as good as it looked. The omelette was more of a very thin scrambled fried egg that wrapped on top of the mound of fried rice. There wasn't any crab in the fried rice, but they put actual chunks of crab on top of the rice and omelette. Both the rice and omelette (scrambled fried egg) tasted very rich and umami.
5) Talay Claypot Glass Noodles (glass noodles with mussels and shrimps, Chinese celery, cilantro roots, ginger, garlic) - I liked the chunks of Chinese celerey and ginger in this dish. I chose not to pour the seafood sauce into the claypot, so I could taste the true seafood taste without any sauce. There were big New Zealand mussels and a generous amount of shrimps in the dish.
The drinks menu had a lot of creative Thai spins on cocktails and mocktails. Desserts selection included some of the most common Thai desserts and snacks such as mango coconut sticky rice, durian coconut sticky rice, khanom krok (steamed small Thai coconut pancakes - one of my favourite Thai street snacks), and khanom tuay (steamed coconut custard). read more