Asian Palace, Thai and Chinese Restaurant, Carlow.

Review

A little over a year ago, both myself and Paolo ate in a small Chinese restaurant in Bunclody called Peony Court. Outside of a handful of restaurants, including Eatzen and China Sichuan, the food was fabulous. Now part owner Catherine has opened a bigger restaurant in Carlow Town called the Asian Palace, where the food is equally as good.

The Asian Palace is situated over D Bar on Kennedy Street in the heart of the town. They also run the bar downstairs, but entrance to the restaurant is through a courtyard and up the stairs. The room is very tastefully decorated, thee are no red dragons or pagoda’s, just cream walls, dark wooden floors and the coolest bamboo reed lamps that also act as dividers between the tables, trust me they’re cool!

The menu is divided into a Thai menu and a Chinese one. As is normal they are long and feature all the usual suspects, but with some really excellent additions. I went along with my wife, Deirdre, who is heading off to Abu Dhabi to manage a project next week, so we had a lot to talk about. Or more precisely, she had a lot to talk about, what with such an exciting prospect to look forward to.

We decided to stick with the Thai menu for the starters and chose Chinese dishes for the main course. While munching our way through prawns crackers and sipping our waters, we picked a selection of Thai starters – Thoong thong (Golden bags in English, which sounds uncomfortably like David Beckham’s nickname, but are actually deep fried prawn or chicken in filo pastry), Chicken satay and prawn toast – and had to try the Yam Naue Yang – thin strips of steak on shredded lettuce, red onion, chopped tomato with mint and coriander and sprinkled with lemon and lime juice. This salad was one of the nicest dishes I have eaten in a long time. The beef was extremely tender and the flavours exploded in the mouth.

Our main courses were a selection of seafood with salt and chilli, roast duck breast stuffed with prawn meat and served with a crabmeat sauce and steamed jumbo prawns with garlic and Soya sauce, all served with fried rice. I had the salt and chilli seafood in the Peony in Bunclody before, and this was equally as delicious. The duck breast was terrific, the textures and flavours of the duck and prawn were perfect foils to each other, and the jumbo prawns were really mini lobsters and were to die for.

There are literally hundreds of Thai and Chinese restaurants in this country, many serving very standard, middling fare. There are very few of this quality. While Carlow is perhaps not best served with great restaurant, the inhabitants are lucky to have what must rank as one of the top ten oriental restaurants in the country, and that goes for both Thai and Chinese.

* As a postscript, we were too full for a dessert, but had promised our daughter we would bring some food home for her, and in addition to wrapping up what we couldn’t eat, we also got a Thai green curry with chicken, which ended up being dinner the next day. In all honesty, it was the best I have ever had, and makes a trip to the Asian Palace a must all on its own.