NYC Food Truck Lunch: Shrimp Pad Thai From Rhong Tiam

Perry, the founder of New York Street Food, brings you his latest review on New York City street food.

If you like pad thai, that's all the Rhong Tiam pad thai cart cooks for lunch. You can get it with chicken, veggies, shrimp, tofu, beef and a few other options. We must warn you, the prices are high, but they serve one of the better versions of pad thai around.

There's a Rhong Tiam Express restaurant in the Flatiron District, and their cart parks a couple of blocks away, on 5th Ave between 20th & 21st St.

The cheapest pad thais here are the veggie, chicken and tofu options at $10 each. From there, it jumps quickly to $15 for wild-caught shrimp or grass-fed beef, and even more for Berkshire pork, squid or Peking duck.

If you're all about food quality, this is the place to get lunch. The shrimp were plump and juicy, although there were only around 6 or so.

(credit: Perry R.)

The rest of the pad thai was good too, with crushed peanuts, scallions, scrambled eggs, bean sprouts and chili powder off to one side to mix in at your option. A wedge of fresh lime was provided to squeeze lime juice over your meal.

The flat rice noodles were nice and springy, and you could taste the sweet rice wine in the sauce. There was not a lot of sauce, but what sauce there was held everything together. Even without the chili powder, there was a slight kick to the pad thai.

Even though you can get pad thai from food carts in midtown for about $7, it's not nearly as good as Rhong Tiam's. Yes, you pay for the quality, but based on the traffic at the Rhong Tiam cart, there's definitely a market for higher quality (and higher priced) pad thai.

The Rhong Tiam cart is on 5th Ave between 20th & 21st St every weekday, but you can be sure by checking the Rhong Tiam Pad Thai Cart Twitter here. They do not seem to have a Facebook page or website though.