Land Thai Kitchen: Our Go-To Cheap Lunch Place

What's your go-to restaurant?  You know, the one you call whenever you crave take-out or want to enjoy a nice, inexpensive meal for two.  For us, we head to (or call up) Land Thai Kitchen.  Like its sister restaurant Recipe, Land Thai Kitchen features affordable food in an elegant (albeit tight and narrow) space.  So when I had a friend in town from Montreal and mentioned the "$8, 2-course Thai lunch", she immediately perked up and asked, "Where is it?" and "Can we go there now?"

The $8 lunch special includes an appetizer and an entree.

There are plenty of choices and for an appetizer, I usually order the Vegetable Dumplings, but this time we opted for the Root Vegetable Spring Rolls.

Crispy and not too greasy, these spring rolls contain parsnip, carrots, beets, lotus root, and glass noodles.

An additional lunch special included a Roasted Chicken Salad (appetizer) and Wok Spicy Cuttlefish (entree) ($9).  The salad had chicken, romaine lettuce, onions, tomatoes, cucumber, and toasted rice.  Loved the chili lime juice that gave the salad a tangy, spicy, and tart kick.

This was the Pad Thai with Shrimp that we chose along with the spring rolls.  (Note that this bowl only shows half of the full entree as my friend excitedly started to share our entrees before realizing I hadn't yet taken a photo.  We were obviously very hungry!)

The bowl of rice noodles, egg, bean sprouts, scallion, tofu, peanut, and tamarind sauce satisfied our Pad Thai craving. 

Again, only half of the cuttlefish dish made it into a shot, but you can see the plump white cuttlefish (with its curly arms) as well as the medley of vegetables (Thai eggplant, bamboo shoot, bell peppers, and Brussels sprouts).  Cuttlefish is from the same family as squid and octopus, thereby having similar texture to grilled calamari.  Served with Jasmine rice, this dish was very spicy due to the branches of green peppercorns.

The lunch special is available every day, from noon to 3:30 pm for both in-house and take-out.

Land Thai Kitchen is located at 450 Amsterdam Ave (btwn 81st and 82nd Sts).