Harborside Thai & Sports Bar

A few doors down from the Filipino Food & Bakery joint was Harborside Thai and Sport Bar, which had, in my opinion, incongruous Art Deco font.

In the circle were the words, Thai, Lao and sushi...

It was right about lunch time and although we had a tiny bit of a snack with the hopia and the pan de ube, we ventured into the restaurant...

I read on previous yelp reviews that this place had changed ownership several times. It also used to be Harborside Sushi and Sports Bar, then they added Thai (and apparently Lao!) last year. Kind of eclectic. I think they probably didn't want to change the signage too much.

Again, a bit of a random location, but catering to the military clientele. It's not like there is an actual neighborhood here but mostly people going to and from the naval base and/or their work.

We weren't sure what to expect. There was a lot of Thai decor (wall hangings with elephants, wood carvings, etc)...

a bar where you can imbibe your alcoholic beverages and watch one of several flat screens (hence the sports bar, yeah)...

and Japanese paper parasols hung at odd points in the room.

The menu was all over the place as you can imagine.

I didn't take photos of the whole menu. The sushi they offered were those crazy non-traditional rolls. The Thai portion looked like every other Thai menu. As for the Lao, when I asked the waitress which were the Lao items, she said it was only papaya salad (with their Lao fish sauce) and Larb. No nam khao!

I ended up getting the yellow curry...

I bet you can guess what TC ordered...

The last time we had Thai, Bert had the peanut steak and wanted to try another steak dish, so he chose #41, the Tiger Cry steak.

I don't know about you, but THIS is NOT what I expected when we got our Thai iced coffees. Whipped cream? Really?

Our coffees were way too sweet and easily one of the worst versions we've had. Blech!

So, no Lao for us. We'll just stick with the food at Asia Cafe or Sang Dao for our Lao. We stuck to Thai food here.

As expected, TC's pad thai with chicken. This was pretty good, the noodles were nice and springy and not drowned in sauce. Nor was it too dry and tasteless either. This was a nice balance of flavors and textures.

My yellow curry with a rather generous portion of shrimp (at least seven or eight pieces were in there). I also see Mr. TJ and La Ley order yellow curry whenever we go to lunch so I thought I'd give it a go.

I was expecting more potatoes in my curry but this version was heavy on the onions and green bell peppers. It also had carrots and peas (which I did not expect, the peas that is). You can specify the spice level of your food (1 to 10, with 10 being the hottest), so lightweight that I am, just got a "3". It really wasn't spicy at all, which was good because I didn't want to, uh suffer the consequences later. My curry was all right but not something I'd get again since I'm not a big fan of soupy dishes.

Bert's Tiger Cry steak with a side of their "spicy lime" sauce, which really wasn't spicy. It tasted like lime and salt in some sort of dark sauce (not sure if it was fish sauce or not). The cut of meat was really cheap and fatty.

Bert wasn't too thrilled with this. Even though it looked like a lot, the meat was too tough and fatty for him to enjoy. That'll learn 'im. What not to get. Perhaps this place is trying to please too many factions. Wouldn't it be better for a restaurant to do execute a few things right than a lot of things wrong?

Harborside Thai & Sports Bar
2844 Main St., Suite B
San Diego, CA 92113
(619) 269-8424

www.harborsidethai.com

I'm not sure if we will have that same meal again (maybe for the pad thai but we can get that anywhere it seems), but it was worth going to at least once. This is a pretty random area and not one that we'd normally be exploring, but it was interesting to see what was out here that day...