Patara, Thailand, has won numerous awards since opening in 2002. There are now 14 branches of the restaurant worldwide, not including the original Patara in Thailand. There are four alone in London but the one that I always seem to walk by is the one in Greek Street, Soho. We decided to try Patara tonight at the last minute and it seems we’ve picked a busy night as the restaurant was fully booked but managed to fit us in for a 7.00 – 8.30 slot.

The restaurant is gorgeous inside. Amazingly the first half of the top floor is taken up by large couch areas. I guess to seat the people who are willing to wait to sample Patara offerings. In typical Thai style service we were immediately welcomed into the restaurant with big smiles and directly taken to our tables. Our waitress was also very quick to come over to us with a big smile of her own. I was heartened to see that we were left enough time to choose a drink from the menu. Nothing more I hate when, after being seated, you are immediately asked what drink you would like.

At first, looking through the menu, we were a bit baffled by the extensive choice which covered appetisers, soups, salads, meat-poultry dishes, curries, fish-shellfish dishes, vegetable dishes, side dishes and desserts! The first page is, helpingly, the Chef Recommendations and did contain a few dishes that caught our eye. The menu is authentic Thai but options have innovative twists which make worth coming to this restaurant, and paying a bit more, worth the visit. I wanted to sample everything but Pat was thankfully a voice of reason and we managed to come up with what I thought was quite a balanced choice, if a little heavy on the meat side.

We decided to forgo starters in favour of desserts so we headed straight into our main course which consisted of: nua tom kati (Slow braised beef in aromatic coconut reduction with fresh lime, lemongrass and chilli), massaman osso buco (Veal osso buco braised in massaman curry with lotus seeds accompanied by cucumber salsa and pita bread) and pad makua yao (Thai long aubergine sautéed in spicy yellow bean sauce with sweet basil.) It was lucky we limited it to those three dishes as they all just barely fit on to the table. All three dishes were presented nicely, extremely yummy and, granted the price was a little higher than the norm (average of £14.50 for the two meat dishes), had a fair amount of substance to the dishes. Between the two of us, along with two servings of coconut rice, it was more than enough to fill us.

For desserts we tried the gati sod sundae (Home made coconut ice-cream with exotic fruit) and kaoneow berries (Sticky rice pudding served with seasonal fresh berries, vanilla ice cream and palm sugar sauce.) Extremely yummy though interestingly it was my sticky rice pudding which resembled a sundae more than Pat’s coconut ice-cream.

We had a lovely time in Patara. The service was fantastic and friendly, the food was top-notch (and I liked the twists on ordinary thai dishes) and the atmosphere was great. Minor complaint was that our table was rather close to the table next to us however this is something you have to get used to in London and is not something unique to Patara.

Definitely recommended. Total bill, including 12.5% service and two non-alcoholic drinks, was £68.