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Swaddee Thai is one of my favorite Thai restaurants in the valley. They make the absolute best yellow curry around. It's a spot I frequently visit for lunch, just as I did yesterday.

I was really in the mood for sticky rice with mango ever since the last time I had it at Yupha's. Given that I find Swaddee's food generally better than Yupha's, I was looking forward to seeing how their version of the tasty dessert stacked up.

As usual, I ordered the yellow curry, 5 star "Thai hot". This is usually amusing to my friends and coworkers as I tend to sweat profusely when I eat it, and sometimes even before the dish makes it to the table. For me, it isn't hot enough unless it makes me sweat. I like my yellow curry so spicy that it almost resembles red curry, and Sawadee usually gets the heat right. As expected, when my meal arrived, it was just what I had expected. The potatos cooked to the point where they are still firm, almost crunchy without being raw. The carrot the same way. The sauce itself was that perfect balance of hot and seeet that I just can't seem to get enough of. I could drink this stuff with a straw!

When I first started ordering the dish, I used to spoon it out of the bowl and onto the mound of rice on my plate. Not anymore. These days, I spoon some of the rice from my plate into the bowl of wonderful golden red goodness and eat it with a spoon, just like soup.

Although I had asked for an order of the mango and sticky rice to be brought out with my meal, it didn't actually arrive until we were all done eating. Normally this would have been fine, but we were in a bit of a hurry to make it back to work. When the dessert arrived, I was a little disappointed right off the bat. At Yupha's, the presentation was artistic with the sticky rice molded in a mound, and each half of a mango nicely fanned out across the plate and garnished with a flower. The plate I got at Sawadee contained what can only be described as a "glop" of the sticky rice on the plate with the two cut halves of the mango on either side, sliced through, but not fanned.

Unfortunately for me, the overall taste of the dish wasn't much better. The rice was overly starchy and bland, with the sweetness of the coconut milk unevenly distributed. The mango wasn't bursting with flavor as it was at Yupha's either. So, while Swaddee may make a better yellow curry than Yupha's, they could certainly take a lesson or two from her on how to make a great sticky rice with mango.