Sen Thai Noodle Bar + Tuk Tuk Thai Street Food

There are a few mysteries worth exploring at Irvine’s Trade Food Hall, which is notably home to two seemingly separate Thai restaurants, one openly advertising the other. Tuk Tuk Thai Street Food is the first you’re likely to see, named after the bike-drawn carriages found in Thailand’s capital city Bangkok, and part of a small chain with additional locations in Orange and Santa Ana (inside the 4th Street Market). Walk down a Trade hallway and you’ll find the second restaurant, Sen Thai Noodle Bar, which turns out to be a sister concept from the same owner. You’ll see references at Tuk Tuk to Sen, but neither of their web sites refer to one another, nor to their owner’s third concept: The Chicken Rice, a Thai and Hainanese chicken restaurant that isn’t at Trade but can be found separately in Tustin or next the Santa Ana Tuk Tuk.

(To add to the confusion, there are competing restaurants in Los Angeles and San Francisco with almost identical Sen and Tuk Tuk names, as well as Irvine’s Sen Tea House and Garden Grove’s Sen Vietnamese Cuisine. All are apparently unrelated to the Thai restaurants inside Trade.)

Sen Thai Noodle Bar’s menu consists of numerous bowls of Thai soup featuring standard rice noodles, egg noodles, fat rice noodles, and rice vermicelli; almost every one is $16 or $18, with the exception of Leng Saap, spicy pork bone soup ($14). Classics range from wonton and Tom Yum soups to various boat noodle versions – basic beef, house special (multiple cut) beef, and pork – and the Northern Thai crispy/soft egg noodle dish Khao Soi ($16). Most of the noodle soups are served with ample broth, though repeat visitors familiar with Sen from its earlier days note that some dishes now are being served “dry” style, with little liquid.

We went with some atypical choices on our visit, opting for locally hard to find Khao Man Gai, the Thai version of Hainanese chicken rice ($15), served as a mount of chicken broth and ginger-soaked rice with boiled chicken, sliced cool cucumbers, spicy chicken broth, soy sauce, and minced ginger. One step below Irvine’s and Stanton’s Chic Now in intensity of flavors, this is nonetheless a nice rendition, and a much healthier chicken lunch or dinner than can be had at neighbors Bao Chick or London Chippy. Spicy wontons ($10) served from a cardboard carton tasted better than they looked – lightly spicy, quite meaty, and just chewy enough to avoid disintegrating in the chili-vinegar sauce.

The same was true of Sen’s mango sticky rice dessert ($10), which didn’t look beautiful but combined delicious fresh mango slices with just enough butterfly pea-tinted rice and sweet condensed milk to make two-person sharing certain to inspire some “who got more” jealousy. A large, perfectly balanced but visually bland Thai Iced Lemon Tea ($4.50), was easier to share.