To celebrate Pat’s birthday we took the family to Patara – one of the nicer Thai restaurants in London. With a number of venues around town it almost falls into the chain category – but the food certainly isn’t chain quality. You’ll pay a little bit more at Patara but its worth it for the delicious food that you get.

We kind of got excited over the food and ended up over ordering but it was very very good and we just managed to finish it all off.

For starters we tried the satay trio (chicken, prawn and beef satays); tod mun pla – goong (Thai fish and prawn cakes with cucumber salsa) and goong-nua yang baichaplu (aromatic beef and prawns in betel nut leaves on skewers with sweet chilli sauce)

All very good but I have to be a bit partal to the chicken satay. Don’t know what the trick is to getting the chicken so juicy and tender but still with that bbq flavour/essence to it. With our main we ended up getting gai yang kamin – which was sort of similar to the chicken satay in the sense it was a char-grilled chicken on a stick and whilst tender it didn’t actually have much flavour.

The other mains were a pla tod sauce takrai (Deep fried whole sea bass in batter and served with light tamarind-lemongrass sauce) – a really gorgeous fish dish; panaeng nong gae (Tender lamb shank in paneang red coconut curry scented by kaffir lime leaves) – a lamb dish that even I would eat; and massaman osso buco (Veal osso buco braised in massaman curry with lotus seeds accompanied by cucumber salsa and pita bread ). Told you we were greedy! Ha ha! Oh, we also had a side of veg – must have our greens – and a Pad Thai!

For desserts only three of us could fit it in – Baked banana, Sticky rice and Coconut tart. All yum.

Another gorgeous meal at Patara.