Larger Than Expected

The thing I love about going on a long trip, like with Speedgaming Live 2025, is that I get to hit a bunch of restaurants and try a bunch of places I’ve never been before. The crew I hang out with each year really tries very hard to find new places to go each time, and we rarely want to eat the same stuff twice. I’ll go back to places after the fact, especially once I find a few favorites (more on that when we get to the Great Asian Food Crawl 2025), but during one of these trips it’s about finding new experiences, new places to sample, new restaurants that could become a favorite.

Cho Phra Ya Thai does a lot right that could put it high on the list for future trips. It’s a Thai restaurant (as if the name didn’t make that clear) with a large menu and plenty of options. I got over there during the lunch shift, and even that menu was full of great dishes to sample. It was hard even narrowing down just what I wanted to eat because there were so many things that sounded good, especially on a colder day in Virginia when you just wanted to warm up with some spicy, tasty Thai food.

Credit where it’s due, the lunch menu is huge as are the lunch portions. The meal I got, Cashew Chicken (which was marked “extra spicy”, just the way I like it), came in what felt like a dinner-sized bowl along with rice and a spring roll. I also added on a bowl of Tom Yum soup so as to try and get a full meal experience that I could report on. I nearly didn’t go with the Cashew Chicken, mind you, as I was also eyeing the Garlic Sauce, Pa Kra Pow, and Pa Pik Khing, all of which were also marked as spicy (spicy food being something I do love). In the end I went with Cashew because I liked its mix of veggies better than the other dishes on offer. But there was easily 20 items I could have chosen from (especially if I wasn’t a stickler for going to the spicy end of the equation).

The spring roll was pretty good. It was light and crispy, filled with a nice, if relatively inoffensive, mix of veggies. It was served with a sweet sauce, like a chutney, which had a light, fruity flavor. It was pretty nice, and helped to set the stage for the meal, although I wouldn’t say it was a stunningly good example of a spring roll. It was fine, but not too flavorful, saved in large part by the chutney sauce on the side.

I was less impressed by the Tom Yum. While I liked its mix of veggies (and I went with the veggie version of the soup of the chicken variety), the soup broth itself wasn’t great. Denoted as a lemongrass soup, with a tomato base, mostly what I tasted was salt. It was far more salty than just about any other Tom Yum I’ve sampled before, leaving, well, a bad taste in my mouth. Once I’d eaten all the veggies out of it I shoved the bowl aside as I absolutely didn’t want to finish the broth.

But the meal was perked up a solid bit by the Cashew Chicken. Served with cashew nuts (of course), scallions, carrots, and onions, this was a very tasty dish. It was savory and spicy, with solid kick and a lot of sauce. It’s effectively a Thai version of Kung Pao, which is one of my go-to dishes any time I sample a new Chinese restaurant, so it was a natural pick for me here as well (even if I did also like its mix better than some of the other dishes I looked at). I ate far more of this tasty dish than I should have, and left with a full container of it as well to take back to the hotel to snack on later. It was very good, and far more food than I would have expected.

I did also get one more item, the Thai Iced Coffee, because that’s an auto get for me at any Thai restaurant. The coffee was good, with the sweetened milk stirring into the black, dark coffee and making for a very strong, very powerful, but very tasty beverage to sip on. While I know this drink isn’t for everyone – you have to like strong coffee to want to drink this – I felt like the restaurant’s version of it was right in that sweet spot for lovers of the drink.

Cho Phra Ya Thai didn’t hit it out of the park for me but they got enough right on this first visit that I very likely would be willing to go again at some point in the future. The Cashew Chicken was a winner, but I’d probably sample other appetizers over the spring roll if I went in for dinner. I’d get the iced coffee again but would absolutely avoid the Tom Yum soup. This is a place where if and when I visit again I’d be more choosy about what I get. Cho Phra Ya Thai can nail some stuff really well, but they can also fail on some simple dishes, so this is a restaurant where you want to learn what they’re good at and avoid everything else. You can’t just assume everything will be good.