A Special Evening at Nitaya Thai Restaurant

Recently I had the good fortune to spend an evening with Cynthia of the truly amazing food blog Tastes Like Home. She was visiting friends in Champaign-Urbana, and one night we got together for dinner. Of course, I left it up to her to choose the restaurant. I thought she might want to check out one of the many places in town that have opened since last she was here, but I found out differently!

You see, Cynthia adores Thai food, and she can't get the good stuff in Barbados, where she lives. She had already, on this visit, been to Thara Thai and to Siam Terrace, so you'd have thought she'd had enough Thai food—but no. She needed more! So off we went to Nitaya in downtown Champaign.

For starters, we had a combination appetizer platter consisting of spring rolls, chicken satay, steamed dumplings, and crab rangoon. The rangoon wrappers were wonderfully crispy, but I detected no crab in the filling. The steamed dumplings (which, by the way, we special-requested; normally potstickers come in the combo) were tender and good, and the spring rolls were tasty, too. My least favorite item was the satay; while the chicken had a nice flavor, it was rather overcooked and dry.Cynthia had the pork noodle soup, which looked and smelled fantastic, and she thoroughly enjoyed it. It was absolutely filled with pork and thin noodles and shrimp (again, we special-ordered the added shrimp), and it was topped with fresh bean sprouts and green onions. I am definitely going to order that soup next time I go; what a warming soup for a cold fall or winter night.I branched out and tried, on Cynthia's recommendation, the pad kee mao, which I'd never had before. I've had pad Thai, of course, and I also love pad see ew, but pad kee mao had so far eluded me. Wide rice noodles are mixed with a ton of vegetables and a soy-based sauce, and I had shrimp in it as well. I had chosen "mild" when the waiter asked, because at Thara Thai, "mild" is pretty spicy for my taste. Mild at Nitaya was really mild, but I put some of the red-pepper sauce on the condiment tray on it, and that perked it right up. I've read that traditionally, this is an extremely spicy dish; the name means "drunken noodles," possibly because the spiciness will chase away a hangover and/or because it's a readily available street food often eaten at the end of a long night of drinking. Next time, I'll not be a wimp and will order it "spicy." (Having developed something of a pad kee mao addiction from this experience, I tried it again soon after at Thara; it was good there, but I liked the version at Nitaya a bit better. The shrimp in the Nitaya version were larger and were not overcooked, and overall I just liked the dish better there.)Cynthia and I practically closed the place, we talked for so long. I feel very lucky to have met and spent an evening with her. Oh—and she was kind enough to bring me "foodie" presents, knowing that I had lived in the Caribbean and that there would be things I missed that I can't get here. Thank you so much, Cynthia, for the guava cheese, the kuchela, the cocoa sticks (cocoa tea will be so good this winter!), and the guava jam.