Little Plearn, Berkeley

It's about time for a negative review...Andy had never had Thai food before, and Zoey and I were in the mood so we decided to take him out. This was before the days of my distrust in Yelp, so we decided to go to Little Plearn, "the best Thai food in Berkeley!" Little did we know what was in store for us.

I don't care if it was an off-night for their cook, the food that we had was inexcusable, as was the service. The girl who served us seemed to not be able to care less as to what we ordered, and didn't give us any suggestions for food when we asked. Eventually, we went with chicken satay, pad thai, and a chicken curry dish.

After waiting forever, Zoey and I got our Thai iced tea, which was thicker than usual and also sweeter. I was only able to drink about half of it before already starting to feel full.

Then, our underwhelming chicken satay came. Ignoring the annoyingly and borderline retarded couple behind us who kept saying, "oh my god I can't believe how authentic this place is," we dug in.

The chicken was dry and burned on the edges, and totally flavorless. The peanut sauce, which I usually look forward to, was thick and tasted like it had sweet cream in it. Not good. The creamy flavor took over the entire sauce so it didn't even taste like it had peanuts in it. Maybe there was peanut extract, if that exists?

Despite ordering our pad thai "spicy," it was overwhelmingly sweet and had no chili flavor in the slightest. I realize that pad thai is probably the most westernized dish of them all, but the waitress was no help in that area. The noodles stuck together, and there were about a pound of green onions in the dish. Plus, the limes that were served with them were dried up and when squeezed produced nothing.

The last dish that we ordered was a yellow curry with chicken. I've made a similar dish according to what my mom told me to do over the phone ("just throw some curry in a pot with oil and veggies"), and it came out better than this. Again, the sauce was overly sweet and had no spice to it. Aside from a few pieces of chicken, there were maybe three carrots and two bites of potato.

If the sauce had been delicious, that would have been okay, but it wasn't. Even the rice was terrible--it was mushy and stuck together. Yep, we were still hungry, and no, we didn't want to try dessert. Not that we were asked.

The most entertaining part of the night was the fact that we ended up having about three bags of leftovers because none of us could eat the food. Zoey and I felt bad putting it to waste so we thought we'd bag it up and give it to a homeless person. Apparently the homeless in Berkeley aren't hungry--we walked around for about thirty minutes and NO ONE wanted the food.

Thank you, Little Plearn, for a terrible dinner, overpriced food, a little bit of exercise in downtown Berkeley, starting my distrust of Yelp, and a reality check as to the eating habits of the Berkeley homeless.