Thai Pudpong: Thai restaurant in West Vancouver

Thai Pudpong is a Thai restaurant located in West Vancouver. As a pad thai lover, I am always on the lookout for a good Thai place in Vancouver. This review is based off a takeout experience.

Food

We order 4 dishes for 2 people.

Crab delight ($11)

This is not a dish we usually order from Thai places and in fact, I haven’t really seen this pop up on the menus of other Thai restaurants, but we order it because it sounds interesting.

The crab delight has crab meat and cream cheese in a wonton pastry, served with a sweet & spicy sauce. It kind of looks like a spring roll but more deluxe because it’s packed with different things.

Now I’m not a fan of putting cream cheese into a lot of foods (get out of my sushi), but this crab delight is quite a delight indeed. The cream cheese and wonton pastry go really well today – crunchy and soft – and the spicy sauce mitigates that overly sweet flavour from the cream cheese.

Larb ($12)

I first tried larb on my trip to Laos. Larb there is kind of like a sticky rice with different minced meats. I found it to be generally tasteless.

Thai Pudpong labels their larb appetizer as a Thai style lettuce wrap with ground chicken, pork or beef tossed in a lime and chili sauce, with red onions and cilantro. Now I love my lettuce wraps so we add this to our order.

I’m not going to comment on the lettuce because lettuce is just lettuce… unless it’s rotten. We choose ground beef for our meat and the larb. The lime and chili sauce is very predominant in this larb, which gives it a nice refreshing and tangy taste. However, it is not as good as the lettuce wrap we tried at Ban Chok Dee, a different Thai restaurant in Maple Ridge.

Pad thai ($14)

I straight up judge a Thai restaurant by how good their pad thai is. Pad thai are thai rice noodles pan fried with prawns, tofu, bean sprouts and egg. It is usually topped with grounded peanuts.

For the price point, the portion size is generous and I like how they include prawns in their pad thai. Some places make you pay extra to have prawns but it’s not really pad thai without prawns!

I also prefer my pad thai with the sweet sauce instead of the sour sauce. Different regions of Thailand use different sauces and basically the sour sauce has a brighter and redder colour while the sweet sauce has a more brown/orange colour.

So luckily, their pad thai uses the sauce that I prefer. It is a pretty decent pad thai and is not missing anything important.

Mango sticky rice ($6)

This is a classic Thai dessert that I loved to eat when I was in Thailand but I don’t order is frequently here in Vancouver. It is a simple dessert and Thai Pudpong met all my expectations.

The mango was not sour and the sticky rice was coated coconut milk, giving it a sweet flavour that pairs well with the mango. Good enough to share with 2 people as glutinous rice can be very filling.

Final thoughts

I think Thai Pudpong is a pretty good Thai restaurant since it met all my expectations. I find that there are not a lot of Thai restaurants in general across the Lower Mainland so if you are in West Vancouver, this is a viable option.

Prices are reasonable and portion sizes are reasonable too so I would order from them again if I am in the area to try their curries. However, I wouldn’t say this is the best Thai food I’ve had in Vancouver.

Sincerely, Loewe