Restaurant Review: Thai Ivory Cuisine Restaurant, Bedford, Nova Scotia

Anyone who lives near Halifax is going to recognize this sign for the Stardust Motel hanging out by the Bedford Highway. It seems to have been there forever! What I had not noticed before was the sign below for Thai Ivory Cuisine.

Most hotels have generic restaurants but Thai Ivory Cuisine is far from ordinary when it comes to food and decor. Also,a $10 Thai lunch is hard to beat.

It is not a huge restaurant but holds a respectable amount of patrons which is good because people were coming and going quite regularly.

You definitely do not feel like you are in Bedford as you walk around the restaurant, investigating shrines and artwork.

The ever-photo-elusive Shelagh from Alice in Paris Loves Art and Tea took me out to lunch, introducing me to this restaurant and helping me out in my search for real Pad Thai. Both of our birthdays are in January and it was not until months later that we got to celebrate together here on rare sunny day in March.

There is so much to look at while you wait for your food.

Quite a charming restaurant with little details everywhere, I love that.

We both got the Pad Thai lunch special for $9.99 (I added shrimp which cost an additional $3) which came with a spring roll, dipping sauce and hot and sour soup. Actually that soup should be called sweet and hot. We could not get over how sweet it was! Good but crazy sweet soup. The spring roll with dipping sauce was pretty traditional.

Here is my Pad Thai platter which looked very promising. Usually when I order it I have to really, really emphasize that I want a mild batch of noodles but they do not make a spicy version of these noodles. At all. That worried me. That is not the Thai way when it comes to food. Thai food is always spicy.

As much as I do not like my head to explode with heat, a little heat is required and these noodles were, unfortunately, too sweet. The missing Thai chillies kept this from being true authentic Pad Thai. Also, the noodles were slightly over cooked which was a shame. So close! They were pretty good but the perfect Pad Thai still eludes me.

It is hard to find a good lunch for $10 and finding Pad Thai noodles in the greater HRM is extremely rare. It was nice to escape the normalcy of Nova Scotia for a while and go some place far away with lots to look at. Just wish there was a bit more heat and a little less sweet.

If you are looking for a great place to have a quick lunch for under ten bucks that is a little different, I recommend trying Thai Ivory Cuisine and give the restaurant four out of five wooden spoons.