Osha Thai Restaurant, San Francisco

While I spent a week out at my company's conference downtown SF back in February, hubby and I ate  at Osha Thai a few times. To be more precise, hubby ate there twice (dinner and lunch) and I thrice (dinner, lunch, and lunch take out). Yes, I know, Thai food three times a week sounds like a lot, but that just shows how much I love the cuisine. Unfortunately, I didn't love Osha Thai so much. It was more poshy (and overpriced) than tasty.

The first dinner was for Chinese New Year, and it started out great! So we ordered a few neat things, like this bacon wrapped scallops appetizer, and it was good.

I wanted to try their tom yum koong and tom kha gai, so we ordered a cup of each. Both of the soups were authentic and quite tasty! The crab meat fried rice was yummy too!

But then it went down hill from there :( We ordered a fish, and it came out over flavored and drenched in this sweet and salty sauce that were both too sweet and too salty. And the sauce was so thick with molasses it turned stringy and sticky. We also ordered a lobster tail and steak, and the lobster too was over-seasoned and the steak overdone. Seriously, how can you mess up lobster? My humble opinion is that lobsters and crabs are so delicious on their own, just a squeeze of lemon or lime, a pinch of salt, and an optional sprinkle of pepper would have been way more than enough! I absolutely detest serving shellfish with butter sauce, because the butter just overwhelms the delicate taste of their meat, not to mention the double (quadruple?) dose of cholesterol! Fresh shellfish is slightly salty from the seawater, which brings out the sweetness in their meat. When restaurants over season their shellfish, to me that's a red flag that they're trying to obscure the tastelessness of not-so-fresh seafood. Tsk tsk tsk. And the steak? I could have sworn it didn't order blackened steak :(

Hubby ordered this coconut gelato for dessert and he liked it. It was too rich for me.

In addition to the dishes above I've also had their Pad Thai with shrimp and Pad Sie Iew with beef. The beef Pad Sie Iew was authentic and delicious, but their Pad Thai was just sad. It was soggy and wasn't good at all! So if you do go here, I recommend the soups and the beef Pad Sie Iew, but other than that I can't vouch for anything else...