Sweetie Cup Thai Café serves authentic Thai food in Valley Park

Name: Sweetie Cup Thai Café serves authentic Thai food in Valley Park
Item: Sweetie Cup Thai Cafe
Author: Dave Lowry

Owner Saengchan Inthichak, who hails from Southeast Asia, offers classic Thai street food and desserts.

by Dave Lowry

June 3, 2019

9:15 AM

Photo by Dave Lowry

One of the recent entrants on the “Weirdly Named Restaurants” list is Sweetie Cup Thai Café, which opened in April next door to The Tavern Kitchen & Bar in Valley Park. There are all sorts of attractions in the neighborhood, but memorable Thai food is not one of them.

So we didn’t have high expectations on a recent visit for lunch. Thai cuisine in St. Louis and most other American cities is pretty much like Mexican fare. There’s lots that OK; there isn’t much that’s superior, even less that’s also reasonably authentic. You expect all of the usual dishes: papaya salad, curries, satay... The server asks how spicy you want your food, and, fearing a hellscape of radioactive peppers that will render your taste buds a smoldering ruin, you opt for the mildest—or saddle up with the spiciest, rendering your taste buds a smoldering ruin.

The canny diner scans a menu in a Thai restaurant looking for clues as to the regional influences. At Sweetie Cup, we noticed Laotian sausage. The owner, Saengchan Inthichak, confirmed it, adding that she was born in Laos but moved with her family to adjacent northern Thailand as a youngster.

Photo by Dave Lowry

The differences between Laotian and Thai cuisine aren’t great, about like the distinctions between the cooking of Alabama and Mississippi. You figure that if there’s a Laotian in the kitchen, the food will be saltier, maybe not as vibrantly spiced. If you want to judge a Thai restaurant, you have to come up with a standard dish. Pad Thai? Maybe. A better choice for judging Thai eateries is pad kee mao, or drunken noodles.

Photo by Dave Lowry

Pad kee mao, or drunken noodles, is reminiscent of a stir-fry, with real kick.

The “drunken” part is misleading. There's no alcohol. Pad kee mao is basically a stir-fry, with lots of sliced vegetables—carrots, green peppers, onions, garlic, ginger—tossed with noodles. The flavoring comes from a combination of oyster sauce, just a sprinkle of sugar, fish and soy sauce. The kick’s delivered with Thai chilies and holy basil. Sweetie Cup’s version comes out, fresh from the wok, with tendrils of steam still rising when it comes to the table.

There’s a smoky undercurrent from the way the soy sauce sizzles when it hits a blast furnace–hot wok. The basil and garlic add as much fragrance as taste. One secret of expert Thai cooking is that every ingredient retains its distinctive taste and texture. In a forkful of this version is the crunch of green peppers, the sweet earthiness of carrots, that herby punch of basil.

What polishes Sweetie Cup's take on pad kee mao is the use of shahen fen. Too many Thai eateries use a thin noodle that's cheaper and easier to prepare. Instead, the Valley Park restaurant uses the right kind—wide, thick rice noodles named after the region in China where they’re a specialty. The texture adds much to the dish.

So where does the restaurant’s name come from? Sweetie Cup’s specialty is Thai desserts, which are a whole other aspect of Thai cuisine, one that still isn’t making much of a sweet mark in our region. This place is working to change that.

Photo by George Mahe

A custom cup with red and green rice noodles, coconut milk, shaved ice, and yellow jackfruit.

What’s called lod chong in Thai is a kind of milkshake from Southeast Asia with endless variations and flavors made from coconut milk, sugar, and green “worms” made of rice noodles. Sweetie Cup calls its take lod chong nam kati—roughly translated, it’s “lod chong surprise,” and, yeah, that’s about right, given those bright-green jelly strands in the sweet coconut syrup.

Courtesy Sweetie Cup Thai Cafe

A variant is a combination cup with red and green noodles. No matter how you mix and match them, it's all for show: The sweet flavor is derived from the coconut milk and sugar syrup, not the colored squiggles with the Gummi Worm chew.

Tub Tim Grob isn’t just a great name for a Dickensian character; it’s also one of Thailand’s most popular desserts. Chunks of water chestnut are rolled in potato flour and then boiled. The flour causes the outside to jellify; inside, it’s crispy-crunchy. Crushed ice and coconut milk are added. If you like the popular boba tea, the bubbles of tub tim grob will be particularly appealing. Bua loi uses the same coconut milk and sugar base, along with sweet glutinous rice balls.

Photo by Dave Lowry

If you’re not crazy about all these kinds of squishy, crunchy stuff in your desserts, opt for one of the shake-like slurries blended with mango, honeydew, strawberry, or green tea. It’ll take several visits to work your way through the offerings here.

Nobody’s likely to confuse a suburban strip mall space for a back-alley Bangkok food stall. Sweetie Cup, though, does manage to bring some classic Thai street food offerings to West County. Now that summer’s upon us, it's a good time to pass on the ice cream and give one a try.