Friday, May 18, 2007

Daily Report: Patrick's Belgian Restaurant Review

After a better-than-average day of work, it was over to Stan's house for cocktails, and then out at 7:00 to Patrick's Belgian Restaurant & Estaminee (I have no idea what that word means), located in the arcade across from Mike's Shopping Mall.

Patrick's is a really good-looking restaurant, with warm dark wood decor, and walls covered with hundreds of mementos to give you that "club house, lived-in" feeling. The menu is thick, but that is because it is repeated 4 times in 4 different languages. If you don't speak Flemish, French, or German, keep turning, and eventually you'll get to the English section. (Belgians are like that.)

For dinner, Pui and Mem had Thai food, along with a giant bucket of mussels steamed in white wine. Stan had the steak Provencal (400 baht) and I had the rabbit stew (300 baht), which was really quite excellent, and the amount of rabbit meat in the stew was very generous. Stan didn't give quite top marks to his steak, but thought it was fine.

Of course, if you go to a Belgian restaurant, you have to have Belgian beer. They have Duvel by the bottle (I think it was 160 baht, but can't remember) which is as good a beer as you can hope for, and I also tried a bottle of Rodenbach, which I didn't care for much.


Stan liked the crepes suzettes so much
he did everything he could to get
every last bit off his plate.
For dessert, I had chocolate mousse, while Stan had crepes suzettes, which he said was one of the best desserts he had ever had in Pattaya... and as always, that's saying a lot.

So: Great food, great atmosphere, and Patrick is on hand to keep an eye on things. My only complaint was that the service staff was always looking anywhere but the customers. (Stan has this game he likes to play, where he'll start waving his hands and count how many seconds it takes for the Thai waitresses to notice him. Here at Patrick's, he made it to 15 seconds of doing jumping jacks in his chair before somebody noticed him.) But, other than that, Patrick's Belgian is a gorgeous little restaurant that is well worth a visit... if only for the crepes suzettes.

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