I have visited Sala Thai for a total of three times now for the last three years, all equally comparable experience.

Ambiance:
Traditional Thai design but in a "touristy" kind of way with over emphasized ethnic artifacts. Lighting was just right and although the restaurant was crowded and busy, my date and I still were seated comfortably

Food:
We ordered the $25 set menu which included an appetizer, three main courses and dessert. The tom yum gum soup was my favorite out of the three. The soup was rich in flavor with an ample serving of shrimp. For the main course, we ordered a stir fry vegetable with shrimp, pad thai, and chicken curry. Nothing special with the three and I've had better curry and pad thai at other establishments like Simply Thai in Yaletown. The dessert was a huge disappointment. We were expecting a serving of fried banana and ice cream, but instead we just received two very small scoops (about 2 full tablespoon round) of coconut ice cream that had a freezer burn taste and feel.

Service:
Decent service. Servers were proper and attentive even during busy hours.

Value:
Not a great value for what you get. If you want a quick Thai food fix , you pay for it. Kind of like an overpriced late night convenience store.

Pros: location, service
Cons: mediocre thai food compared to the price

I would recommend Simply Thai in Yaletown instead.

I went to Sala Thai with a group from work - about 30 people in total. We were seated in an area at the back of the restaurant, which suited our group just fine. We started off with some appies and I tried their Golden Angel Wings - which was boneless chicken wings stuffed with shrimp, meat, vegetable vermicelli noodle & herbs. Sounds much better than it tasted. It was kind of a weird flavour - deep friend and sliced, served with a chili oil sauce. I wouldn't recommend it, or order it again.

For my main, I had the Pa-Nang Tiger Prawns & Scallops, a thick red curry sauce with coconut cream, bell peppers & coconut meat. The flavour was good, but there was hardly any food there. It would only be enough to share if you had at least 2 dishes plus rice.

Basically, the food was ok - but the value isn't there. I'm used to much larger portions with Thai food, so I would go elsewhere next time I'm craving Thai. Actually, there WAS considerable value in their draft beer - they only have one kind though - Big Rock Traditional Ale. A huge pitcher will cost you only $14.99, so that was a plus.

I went to this restaurant on a weekday evening last week for dinner with 2 friends. It is close to the Scotiabank theatres in Downtown Vancouver. The inside of the restaurant looks significantly better than the outside. It was surprising that the inside looked so nice.

The waitress was very charming and she provided great service. Each of us had an alcoholic drink (approx $6-7 for daily special), and we then shared a coconut dish which was spicy, a mee goreng, an eggplant dish, and chicken satays (appetizer). We also had to order a jasmine rice as the dishes we had did not come with rice. The satays came out to $1.50-$2 a piece which is very expensive. The coconut dish, mee goreng and egg plant dishes were about $10-$15 each. The jasmine rice is about $1.75. Including tax and tap, our bill was about $30/person.

The food was quite tasty but the value was very poor given the portions.

You have a delightful young waitress Achara. After an afternoon concert at the Orpheum on March 5, my wife and I had an early dinner at Sala Thai, where Achara not only remembered us from a previous visit many weeks ago, but even remembered what we had for dinner that night ! She is so pleasant and informative of dinner menu selections. Also waitress Onn stopped at our table to recall a nice chat she had with my wife long ago. What an enjoyable day !

Sala Thai

Having been by this Restaurant many times on the way to the Theater's and it has been our intention to always give it a try. Thanks to the snowy streets that day we dropped in to see how Sala Thai would fare.

Its hard to find a really good Thai place to eat after having been to Thailand several times in the past and it makes writing a review difficult as well

Decor......Typical Thai but better then most in our fair city it actually has some very neat designs.

Menu,,,about the same as many Thai restaurants, curries, noodles, rices etc etc, enough to choose from for sure.

Service...a little slow considering there were only 20 people there at the time. We got the feeling at times, they felt they were doing us a favor by having us eat there,,not sure why its not a place to scream about. We would liked to have seen smiles from the staff even if they were put on it would at least lend a welcoming atmosphere.

Food....good, tasty, smaller portions than many Thai places we've been to..authenticity was okay,,,,there are better Thai locations for this in Vancouver and surrounding area.

The Paenang Curry was barely enough for two people, make sure you ask for rice.....at $ 1.75 a serving it should at least arrive hot.!

I would say that Sala Thai is okay at best,,,,considering the price's ,,,more bang for your buck can be found at many Thai Restaurants in our City!

Won't be returning soon with all the other outlets yet to try!

Disappointed

Stumbled into Sala Thai one evening by accident...loved it so much that I've been back on several occasions! I almost always get a noodle dish so I can't really judge what the quality of their other menu items are like, but I've always thoroughly enjoyed my Pad Thai or Spicy Drunken Noodles and always come away STUFFED - most times I can't finish my plate and have some to take home for the next day. I've brought a lot of different people here and it seems like they're all enjoyed their meals as well, and they have branched out further into the menu than I have. Nobody I've dined with at Sala Thai has been really disappointed in their meal.
My biggest gripe here is with service, which can be a bit surly at times, and it's also easy to be ignored when it's really busy.
I would say that the value is pretty good, my boyfriend and I are usually surprised when both of us come away stuffed and the bill came to less than $30..maybe it's just our selections.
I would recommend this restaurant, especially for their Pad Thai. Also, their Long Island Iced Teas are quite strong haha.

We ordered a rockin' soup with mushrooms and large prawns, which was excellent. We immediately set up defenses in case any over-zealous waitress might attempt to take our not-yet-licked bowl, haha.

Then came our two curries - massaman and a red curry with duck. Both were extremely bland and the massaman curry sauce itself reminded us of Wendy's chilli. The duck meat was great, but the chicken wasn't quite there yet.

The presentation was excellent, though the portions were very small. The restaurant itself was also very nice. Drinks were on the expensive side.

Notable negatives:
- The potatoes were bad and tasted like cheese, and gave us mild food poisoning afterward.
- They actually charge you extra for rice, hahaha.

Okay, excellent decor you really get some feel to thai luxury. Mannerable hostess and servers.
Value is not good value. Ordered pad thai, pork curry and rice. Pad thai was good, portion was alright but for the price, not great value. I understand it's a downtown restaurant with a hostess....and nice ambiance but the food here is just average midrange quality. The pork curry was terrible! It wasn't spicy at the least and we ordered spicy....we added in at least 2additional spoonfuls of the curry spice they provided on the side. The pork wasn't marinated so it wasn't tasty and it was quite chewy. The curry had this gross thick film of oil (curry oil? red oil) over the small bowl of curry. I despise small bowls of curry like it's a delicacy or something. It lacked spices and everything. The rice was whatever...it's rice. Not fragrant though if that's what you like.

With so many restaurants in Vancouver, there's no use in settling for average. There are at least 3 other thai restaurants in the surrounding area that are better than this place.

Ordered the appetizer platter and the only good thing on it was the spring rolls, which were only decent and not as flavourful as most thai places. The deep fried tofu was so bland and they had one sauce for all the appetizers.

The pad thai was decent although the noodles were kind of dry and the coconut curry was probably the best thing we had but not all that memorable.

As for service, there wasn't really any. Waiter after waiter walked by and no one had even offered us a drink until our appetizer came and we had asked for some.

All in all the food is alright, the service is subpar and there are plenty of better thai restaurants on Robson.

So I went with some friend to this restaurant again last weekend while we're waiting for "Iron Man" to play. The atmosphere was cozy and nice with some kinda traditional thai theme. We sat down, and were given the menu. While waiting and waiting and waiting, not even one server served us water. Until I asked one of the server to give us water, then they gave us water. It was around 10-15 mins wait just for the water. Finally we ordered some garlic and prawns + 2 sala thai fried rice + 1 spicy sweet fish something I forgot the name. The place wasn't that busy at that time we ordered, but, we had to wait again, for 30 mins more or less for the food to arrive. The server was kinda impolite and unfriendly to us. He might had some bad day or something that day. He didn't smile, and was in a rush with everything. Garlic and prawns were okay, since the prawns were kinda bitter tasting, probably due to excessive pepper. The fish was yummy, too bad I forgot the name. The fried rice was the best in my opinion. However, all the portions were somewhat small and pricey for what we get. We ended up paying around $60ish for 4 meals.
However, the place was great, big and cozy with great thai style restaurant. I wouldn't go back to this place anytime soon tho.