by Alex Melnick

Purple & White Eats: Surin of Thailand
3000 Old Canton Road
Jackson, Mississippi, 39216
601-981-3205

http://surinofthailand.com/jackson/jackson_menu.pdf

Maybe I’m a trash person, but Surin of Thailand was hands-down the nicest looking Thai restaurant I’ve ever been to. Everything is immaculately  placed and looks brand new—probably because the Thai place opened only a few weeks ago.  My favorite decoration is the giant reclining Buddha in the center restaurant. Luckily, Surin of Thailand is also incredibly affordable despite its elegant appearance. A lunch special (which fed three people) was only $7, and the dinner options and sushi options were reasonably priced, making it a great date location.

The wait staff is attentive and gracious. Since it was only 11 a.m. on a Saturday, I didn’t order any drinks but I did spy the bartender making sriracha Bloody Marys and other fancy concoctions that could probably rival Apothecary’s. (I’ll be back for that Bloody Mary.)

I first had the tofu coconut soup, which was awesome because coconut soup is always awesome. But this particular soup was made even better by the fact that it comes free with the lunch special, and that there is finally a place within the Jackson city limits that can cook tofu properly. My co-pilot Corissa Lambert wanted to order octopus sashimi, so we dove into that as well. Lambert, a well-known connoisseur of food and also notorious food snob, was very impressed by the freshness of the octopus. It was almost too fresh for landlocked Jackson. (Are there octopuses in the Rez lake?!?) We also had veggie eggrolls which, to be honest, tasted pretty much like any egg roll I’ve ever had in my life—but they didn’t get soggy when we fed them later to Ken Newburger, so that’s a plus.

And then there was the Pad Thai. Oh man, was there the Pad Thai. I had two meals off that Pad Thai. I liked this Pad Thai so much that I didn’t even mind that they failed to give me hot sauce or make the Pad Thai spicy. (This is saying a lot, because I have had hot sauce on literally every meal until that meal for about… three months or so.) It was well cooked, and Surin put the peanuts on the side instead of putting them all over the noodles, and the dish had more bean sprouts than I could have ever dreamed of. I was in Pad Thai paradise. Or at least, what I thought paradise was until the Surin of Thailand coconut gelato proved me wrong. Despite the incredibly off-putting comment made by my waiter that they “only serve Italian desserts, but it’s okay because little old Thai ladies make them so it’s still authentic,” the gelato was still really good. There were coconut shreds in the gelato. It washeaven.

Overall: 4/5 Dean Katzes

5/5 Décor, 5/5 Food but 4/5 for kind of weird staff comments. Also I think I need to send help for the never-seen little old Thai ladies I were told cooked in the back.