By Diana (Foodology),
Special to The Post

Taste of Yaletown is back for its 10th year of bites, treats, sips, and sights in Yaletown. Until October 30, Yaletown kitchens offer featured menus, special tastings and innovative pairings to tempt the most adventurous foodie. Fixed price menus range from $25, $35 and $45, and offer combinations of food and drink, or even special in-house events.
Urban Thai Bistro is participating this year and showcasing their Thai dishes. They have been in Yaletown since 2000 and are owned by the Thai House group. I visited the Bistro to try their Taste of Yaletown offering.
You can choose from two different sets of appetizers. The first one has three items: BBQ Chicken, Shrimp Balls, and Papaya Salad. The Thai-style marinated BBQ Chicken is served with sweet chili plum sauce, while the Shrimp Ball is marinated shrimp paste wrapped with spring roll wrapping served with a sweet chili plum sauce. Papaya Salad has green papaya strips, carrots mixed with tomatoes, green beans, fresh chilies, roasted peanuts, diced garlic, fish sauce and lime juice. The BBQ chicken was tender and had a nice flavour. The shrimp balls were crispy and the papaya Salad was surprisingly quite spicy.
The second appetizer featured Jalapeno Shrimp, which had jalapenos stuffed with shrimp paste served with house sauce. The appetizer also included a Spring Roll with mixed vegetables and glass noodles served with homemade sweet chili plum sauce topped with ground peanuts. The last item was a Beef Salad with sliced New York beef with lime dressing, red onion, tomatoes and Thai chili.
Soup is the next item to come and you can choose Tom Kah with prawns or mussels. It has a coconut milk broth with galanga, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves and mushrooms. It is quite spicy, so some people may need a big cup of ice water to quench the heat.
Our group tried three main dishes which all came with vegetables and your choice or rice or noodles. The Green Curry Prawns and Scallop has eggplant, peas, bell peppers and basil. The sauce was good and well balanced, and I liked the noodles over the rice. The Kra Pau Duck is sautéed with Thai chili, bell peppers, green beans and fresh hot basil. The Pra Lunm Long Shong Lamb has Thai Peanut sauce on top. 
For dessert, they offered Lychee Jelly, which has layered Jello with different colours. Two small lychees are embedded inside. It was quite a basic dessert and I didn’t feel like it represented Thai dessert very well.
Overall, you get quite a large appetizer and yummy entree. The dessert falls a bit short, but you get a well-rounded taste of what Urban Thai Bistro has to offer. 

 Foodology is a top ranked food blogger on UrbanSpoon. These are the tales of her dine-out experiences. Read more at www.foodology.ca. 

We Rate Urban Thai Bistro: 3/5

1119 Hamilton St, Vancouver 
www.thaihouse.com/urban-thai-bistro