Mint Downtown Thai

A trendy Thai restaurant in the shadow of Horton Plaza on 4th Ave. The restaurant looks bigger inside than what you see up front. Dining area is very dimly lit. Tables are small and without table cloth. There's a bar and a well stocked wine list.

Food price is on the expensive side of moderate. I dropped in for lunch and ordered lunch special yellow curry with chicken. It came with a really small cup of really bland vegetable tom yum soup. The soup tasted like flavored warm water. The lunch special came in a cute combo with steamed rice (you get the choice of brown or white rice), a salad (lettuce, carrots, onions with what turned out to be diluted peanut sauce - could hardly tell, the dining room was so dimly lit I could hardly see anything), a small fried vegetable roll (it was hiding in between the curry bowl and the salad bowl).

A lot of attention was paid to the presentation (all the vegetables - carrots and potato wedges - were fancily cut), but not quite enough to the taste. It was food fit for hospital...

Serving staff was very nice, though. Everyone speak English well. I was seated by one girl, and served by two servers: one main one and one seems to float around delivering appetizer soup. Main server was very efficient and attentive without being a pest.

The place was clean (I think... it was so dimly lit) and right in restaurant row of the Gaslamp Quarter. I'd say it is inoffensive, but wouldn't recommend it as a good ethnic food place.