Pimaan

[Double 0]

Went to thai restaurant on tues with the family. Its in the black hole on the north side of Kinderkermack next to Westwood Lincln Mercury. This location has eaten at least 5 restaurants in the 7 years I've lived in Bergen Co. I hope the new owners have better luck.

We started with a chicken satay, papaya salad, and a spicy beef salad. All good specimens, but the heat vlevel could have been brought up for my tastes.

Next up was tom yum goong soup, good sourness but could have been hotter (spicier)

We followed with spicy fried rice and drunken noodles (spicy) chow fun noodles with basil, veg, pork and hot pepper. Both good but a little greasy.

We finished with Pimaan chicken, fried 1/2 chichen with garlic pepper sauce. This wasn't spicy and I liked it quite a bit.

BTW they have frogs legs preperations which I'm going to try next time.

Its BYO and the check was $65 with tax and tip.

Sorry I can't give you the address but the phone is 201 967 0440.

Overall I'd give it 7/10 with potential. I' ll return its a nice addition to the area.

[toddevan]

Chicken Ginger worthy of take out

- nice people

[Jason Perlow]

A few of us ate there on Saturday night -- very busy, very loud atmosphere. Certainly a good sign for a location that has "eaten" more than a few restaurants!

One thing you can say about the place is they take you VERY seriously when you say you want it very spicy. We didn't see many Asians eating in the restaurant but boy oh boy was the food spicy as promised.

We ordered a few dishes that we thought would benchmark. Rachel ordered the Tom Yum Goong soup -- it was nice and hot, and very sour. We had the Pimaan Rolls, which were basically hot versions of the Vietnamese summer roll, also very good. Chicken curry puffs had a nice subtle curry taste, not as in your face as Bangkok Garden's in Hackensack (although BG's are very good).

The place has a special section of the menu dedicated to grilled/barbequed items. We ordered the bbq chicken, which came out somewhat plain for my tastes but still very juicy and tender. I think next time we will order the barbequed pork, because I am curious as to how well it stacks up against Wondee's Moo Ping.

Thai Sausage Salad was very nice, the sweetness of the sausage went well with the acidity and spicyness of the salad dressing. Everyone pretty much universally thought it was very good, and I'm looking forward to trying some of their other Yums. We all did notice immediately though that larb is NOT on the menu, but our server told us that it could be made to order.

While everything was more than adequately spicy, I was somewhat disappointed in both the noodle dishes we ordered because they appeared to be a bit overcooked. The drunken spicy noodles (Pad Kee Maow) was a bit mushy -- Pad Thai noodles were also too soft and also the sauce was too sweet for our tastes.

I'll note they did a really good job on the sticky rice, which had a nice coconutty sweetness to it and goes really well with the spicy dishes we ordered.

Beef Pad Kaprow (beef with chili and basil) was also again VERY spicy and hot from an ample amount of dried chili flake but one of our guests felt that the spicyness was unidimensional, which I would tend to agree with as it was hard to distinguish some of the other spices in it.

Rachel had a duck curry dish which I didn't try but she will elaborate on.

I will certainly be back to try some more of the other curries and soups and more of the appetizers before I pass total judgement on the place. Overall I'd say it was a "good" Thai restaurant but not exceptional.

[Rachel Perlow]

The Pimaan rolls were crispy (shrimp wrapped in something like phyllo), not the steamed summer roll thing. That was the steamed spring roll. They were good and something I haven't had before.

201 and I agreed that the duck curry was OK, however the duck should have been more tender, i.e. braised. Instead it was like roast duck put in the curry sauce. It was tasty, but not perfected.

If you want to special order the larb, I suggest going on a weeknight. It was way too busy on Saturday night to do a special request.

They've been open only about 5-6 weeks. Address is 79 Kinderkamack, Emerson.

[Double 0]

I'm going to have to go with you guys because what I got was kind of tame. Maybe they saw my kids and figured they couldn't take it (if only they knew the truth).

[Jason Perlow]

I'm going to have to go with you guys because what I got was kind of tame. Maybe they saw my kids and figured they couldn't take it (if only they knew the truth).

I think you have to specifically ASK for it, he said "five stars?" and we said "make it six". I don't think the default spicyness is very high. And we had to say it several times.

[201]

I wasn't really bothered by the softness of the noodles, but agree they could've been a bit firmer. In any case, I enjoyed the drunken noodles quite a bit and they were suitably spicy per our request. Beef krapow was also very spicy, but the flavors were muddled together more, making it a little one-dimensional. I'm not sure how much that had to do with the spice level, but I know that Wondee will often hold back on the spiciness of my beef kraprow and tell me to use chili paste to complete it for my tastes. Perhaps she's worried that it will unbalance the flavors which seems like it may have been the case here.

The char-grilled chicken was tender and moist... I'd say it's a great dish to pair with very spicy ones for a little relief (or as a "safe dish" to order for those not yet familiar with Thai food).

The duck dish could've used more curry and some more cooking to tenderize the duck a bit more. I really wish Wondee's had this dish, because I really enjoy Malee's (in Ridgewood) version of it. Pimaan's dish seemed to use the curry more as a dressing than a base.

I think it's definitely worth mentioning that service was very good. Our waiter was patient and helpful with suggestions. Water was refilled regularly, which was funny for me because I was sitting next to a small wall and would frequently see simply a hand with a pitcher of water pop out in front of me and fill my glass!

It's also worth noting that the presentation of this place seems as though they're shooting for somewhat upscale tastes, but the space doesn't quite get there in my opinion (too bright for one). However, portion sizes are a bit smaller (a couple of appetizers came in threes) and my Thai iced tea was served in a very tall glass with elaborate straw wrapper decoration.

They're closed on Mondays and they offer lunch specials during the week. I'll probably be by sometime this week to check those out. I believe our waiter mentioned something along the lines of soup and salad which sounds pretty damn good for a Thai place in the summer!

[jhlurie]

The two best things were definitely the sticky rice and the curry puffs.

Unlike the majority, I didn't think that the pad thai was all that sweet. I'm not aguing for sweet pad thais as opposed to more savory ones... its just that in my opinion this was only a slight bit too sweet--it wasn't sweet to the extent where the sweetness eliminated any of the other tastes.

This is the kind of place which might improve with feedback and/or time.

[201]

This is the kind of place which might improve with feedback and/or time.

And it's already good as it is. It was certainly an enjoyable experience, but reviews of most new places tend to nit-pick a bit and create that "this would be perfect IF" sort of fantasy.

I hope they break the curse of the location and continue to do well.

[Jason Perlow]

Rachel and I had dinner at Pimaan again tonight.

So I can say now I think that we probably won't be back. Its pretty much an unremarkable Thai restaurant when you consider that we have Wondees and Bangkok Garden in the area as well.

For appetizer we tried the steamed dumplings. Blech. They resembled the "kharnom jib" dumplings served at Wondees, but these were filled with some sort of seafood paste instead of pork. Tasted really fishy, we each had one and both of us made the icky face. Avoid.

We tried the BBQ pork. While they weren't bad, these were no Moo Ping. These were boneless pork chops which were glazed in some sort of Teriyaki-like sweet glaze. Tasty, but not what we were expecting. This by the way, came with the Sticky Rice, but it was just plain sticky rice, not the sweet one we had a few nights before. Apparently that night they gave us the "dessert" sticky rice by mistake. Oh well.

Pineapple fried rice was good, but I've had better versions elsewhere. Ended up taking half of it home along with one of the pork chops.

Green Curry with Beef (Keang Keow Warn) was unremarkable, had too much bamboo shoot in it, a few sliced up asian eggplants (but not the thai ones) and a little bit of basil. Was definitely spicy enough but just didnt excite me.

Rachel had the Ginger Chicken. It looked like and tasted like a chinese take out dish. Not that interesting.