Happy New Year everyone! I it's already 2015, and I would like to evaluate the Thai restaurant I went with Tomoki, in December. I knew from before that there were many tasty and famous restaurants in Aoyama, and I was interested in them, but I didn't really have the chance to go to them. Since the assignment was to go to a restaurant, this was a good chance for me to visit and search for good restaurants in Aoyama. The reason we chose this restaurant is because we usually don't go to ethnic restaurants, and I searched on the internet for good ranked restaurants. There were a few that came to my attention, but I discussed with Tomoki, and since we do not have any likes and dislikes, we decided to go to the Thai restaurant in Aoyama, called "TINUN". The location of this restaurant is near Aoyama Gakuin, and a five minute walk would take you to TINUN.

 The lunch menu are gapao rice, chow fun, Thai noodles of various kinds, such as tom yam kun noodles (shrimp and beef), and pat thai noodles, which are called beefun in Japan. It is very reasonable, because it comes with four different types of side dishes, which are buffet style. Plus, it is 950 yen per person, which is nice for your wallet. On this day, we had pumpkin red curry, fried pig liver and garlic, spicy herb salad, and vegetable soup. I ordered shrimp tom yam kun, which is a spicy and sour noodle, which is commonly eaten in Thai. And since I ordered a noodle dish, I had a small bowl of rice to go with my noodle. I liked the Tom yam kun, since I like spicy dishes. There wasn't as much noodles in my soup as I thought, but since there was the buffet, I think it was a good amount. Before the noodles came, we served ourselves some curry, salad, soup, and the fried liver. To start with the salad, it had a herb that is commonly eaten in the south-eastern part of Asia, called coriander, or pakchi in Japanese. I hear that many people have a dislike to coriander, because of its strong flavor and smell. Besides the coriander, there was also chicken breast, red onion, green onion, cucumber, and red pepper. I think the dressing was lemon based with some other citrus fruits, and spiced with black and white pepper. It was very tasty, and I have never eaten such a combination before, so it was very interesting to me.　The next thing I ate was the pumpkin red curry. It wasn't as heavy as it looked, but it was very spicy. But the spiciness didn't carry on for a long time, which was surprising. I didn't taste much of the pumpkin, and I did not realize it until I saw the menu outside of the restaurant. I only noticed the sliced bamboo shoots (takenoko), bay leaf, and the leaves of pepper inside the red curry. Even though it was spicy, it was very addicting and I went for two servings for the curry. The vegetable soup was made from carrot, egg, cabbage, radish, and chicken minced meat. The last, fried liver and garlic was very tasty. The base of the sauce was fish sauce, and the ingredients were liver, garlic sprouts, onion, carrot, and paprika.

The main menu of my lunch was the tom yam noodle. It looked very spicy because of the nam pla, a kind of spicy liquid that is used in ethnic foods. I loved the spicy and sour taste, and there was a lemon to go with it, and it matched very well.

 

  The environment of the restaurant was very nice, with some music playing in the background, many costumers eating inside. It seemed like most of the people who were eating came during their lunch break, working near Aoyama. Some people were eating by themselves, and that didn’t bother me because of the warm atmosphere. The cooks could be seen by the costumers, and they looked like they were from Thailand.

The overall evaluation of this restaurant was not bad at all, and I thought that I would like to take my friends here someday, because of its tastiness and reasonable price. It was not a vegan restaurant, and I could see that TINUN used a lot of meat and seafood.

 I only introduced the lunch menu for this evaluation assginment, but in the outside of the restaurant, there was a menu for dinner, which had more menus, such as spring rolls, salads, and beverages.

I hope this evalution will be useful for someone wanting to go to an ethnic restaurant!!!