It's Friday. And it's packed. The sliding doors are open, and the patio weather is perfect at Tande Thai, a newly opened restaurant Grandscape in The Colony.
Headed up by Paul Imjard, a classically trained chef and a native of Thailand, Tande Thai serves up family recipes with a contemporary spin. "Our ingredients — our spices and even our juices — are imported directly from Thailand every week," General Manager Michael Lutz tells me.
This truly is a family restaurant. Chef Imjard co-owners the restaurant with his wife Karen Truong. "This restaurant has been years in the making, but it's always been chef Paul's dream. We moved here to The Colony from California just for this," Truong tells me. I ask her how she likes The Colony, and she replies that it's wonderful. "We love the hospitality here and how welcoming everyone is." Lutz's son Jordan is a waiter — following his father's footsteps into the hospitality business. Previously, the elder Lutz was at Del Frisco's Double Eagle Steakhouse.
"Here at Tande Thai, we want to bring service back."
We start off with the Tande wraps (marinated and grilled tender chicken, romaine hearts, vermicelli rice noodles, pickled carrots, cucumber salad) and papaya Salad (shredded green papaya, tomato, carrots, chili, peanuts in papaya vinaigrette), before going into drunken beef noodles (sliced Angus steak, wok-tossed wide rice noodles, egg, sweet bell peppers, basil, garlic, spicy-savory sauce) and yellow curry chicken (tender chicken, roasted potatoes, carrots, yellow curry, side jasmine rice) — all of which were delicious.
The Panang beef short rib (a braised Angus beef short rib with scratch-made Panang curry, roasted broccolini, butternut squash and kaffir lime leaves) is so soft, it comes right off the bone. The drink menu is also well thought out.
"Take a sip, wait seven minutes, and you're in heaven," Michael Lutz tells me, as he places a rum-based old fashioned called "sabi sabi." Seven minutes, huh? Seven minutes, he says. Heaven? Yes, heaven. The drink is made with four rums and orange bitters, poured over a coconut water ice cube. It’s a clever, and more importantly, delicious drink.
For such a new restaurant, it is impressive to see such a well-executed menu right off out of the starting gate. What’s more, there is a range of flavor and spices and sweetness and spiciness that makes eating here so pleasurable.
The service is great: Attentive, detail-oriented and kind. They truly aim to take good care of guests. "My background is in fine dining, and I'm not about turn and burn," Lutz tells me at the end of the evening. "Here at Tande Thai, we want to bring service back." And they're doing it the most delicious way possible.
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