thai time 2 / sports arena – san diego, ca

For my birthday, my friend Laura took me to see a play at the San Diego Repertoire Theater. Before we headed over to the show, we stopped for some dinner at Thai Time 2 – a place Laura had found in one of the many coupon books floating around town (this was for a buy one get one free meal). When we walked in and got a booth in the restaurant, we both kind of gave each other looks simply because of the decor of the restaurant.

Now, I know you should never judge anything by it’s cover… but wow. The pink and teal colors of this place are really not doing it any favors and why on earth does the carpet change color once you get into that “pink” room? Who knows…

We were also in a weird corner with this small door and low hanging pipe. Someone helpfully pointed out the pipe with this little sign. Uh huh.

Despite the strange and baffling decor, we did stay and actually eat food here.

After going back and forth between a few items, Laura and I finally decided on two dishes to share.


[pad see yew with shrimp – $8.95]

Pad See Yew has quickly become one of my new favorite dishes – I’m in love with these flat noodles that’s serviced with this dish. This batch came with broccoli, egg and black bean sauce with a few other veggies thrown in for good luck. This dish was quite tasty and we chose to pair it with shrimp, though you could always go for tofu (or mock meat of your choice), chicken, pork, beef, calamari, seafood, scallop, roast duck or a combination plate.

The sauce was perfectly balanced with the veggies, shrimp and noodles. Slightly sweet (very slight) and a nice flavor from the stir frying. Very yummy!

[peanut steak – grilled steak topped with peanut sauce – $15.95]

Laura really wanted something with peanut sauce on it and we didn’t want to get another noodle dish so we opted to try out this Peanut Steak. The description said it came with peanut sauce but for some reason we didn’t think it would be smothered quite like this!

You can’t even really tell what’s under all of that sauce except that there’s something. One cut though will reveal a perfectly cooked medium rare steak (we were asked how it should be cooked).

It really was quite literally just a steak covered in peanut sauce.

The peanut sauce was really delicious – it was sweet and peanutty and had a really wonderful flavor to it. The steak was perfectly juicy and cooked just right. The sauce coated the steak beautifully and it ended up being my favorite of the two dishes we had that night. I was surprised at how succulent the steak was – the peanut sauce made it so flavorful, too!

As always, you never know how a place is going to turn out until you try their food and I’m glad that we didn’t judge this place too harshly since the food ended up being surprisingly tasty.

Though I still think they should rethink that whole color scheme they got going on here…

Thai Time 2
3545 Midway Dr.
San Diego, CA 92110
(619) 224-3245

Thai Time Restaurant 2 on Urbanspoon


4 thoughts on “thai time 2 / sports arena – san diego, ca

  1. Ooh, we’ve only been to Thai Time III, but never II! I think they are stuck in the 80’s with the decor, but who cares about that if the food is good, right? I like those flat rice noodles too, almost better than pad thai noodles.

    1. Hi CC – The decor is pretty bad, but the food was really tasty. I’m really liking the flat rice noodles more than pad thai noodles lately!

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