After a long walk/trek from Spite, we were searching for a place to eat in Manly. Back to back days…read morein Manly and we still had the same problem of finding a reasonably priced restaurant to eat at.
We settled on Mortar & Pestle, which pans themselves as traditional Thai food, after walking around the area. It was busy on a Friday evening (around 7:30pm) but we were able to get a table inside without waiting. Service was brutal even though they are well staffed. We had troubles with ordering, getting wrong dishes, etc. We weren't impressed.
The dinner menu is massive with appetizers, soup, salad, grill, noodle/fried rice, from the wok, curry, whole fish, seafood, vegetable and desserts. The lunch menu was much more succulent with only two pages of options.
- 2x jasmine rice ($3.00 AUD) - you're going to want to get at least two bowls to sop all your curry sauce up.
- Gang ga ree gai ($16.90 AUD) - beef, sweet potato, pumpkin and onion in a mild yellow coconut curry sauce. This yellow curry was really well executed. So much better than the curry I had at another Thai place in Manly the day before.
- Roasted duck fried rice ($17.90 AUD) - curry & turmeric powder, grilled pineapple, onion, garlic, shallot, egg and Chinese broccoli. Another well executed dish. Everyone loved this one. Generous portion of roasted duck and good wok hei on the rice. Only complaint is that there was barely any pineapple and I thought it was a tad heavy on the salt.
- Hokkien noodle ($15.90 AUD) - stir fried egg Hokkien noodles with chicken, vegetables and oyster sauce. Good variety of vegetables but the sauce was a bit too sweet. Pretty average.
- Soft shell crab with yellow curry ($20.90 AUD) - came with egg, celery and red chili peppers. This came out late as they messed up our original order. Luckily, the crab was delicious; lightly breaded and deep fried. The sauce had a good kick to it. Wasn't a fan of the celery as the only vegetable accompaniment.
If you can get past the terrible service, the food is tasty and reasonably priced for the area.