Starling Travel

A grand opening for a restaurant is usually a quiet affair. A few friends of the restaurant owners show up and they give tours of the kitchen. When Pawit opened his new restaurant, however, it was filled with people, eager to once again eat his delicious food. It was a raging success!

Pawit had been a partner at Thai Garden, but when the business arrangement went sour, he searched for a restaurant to call his own. When he left Thai Garden, the food quality dimished rapidly, so all his loyal customers have been waiting for months for his new restaurant to open up.

Pawit is a perfectionist in the best sense of the word. Not only does the kitchen need to be immaculately clean (take a tour and you’ll feel as if a doctor could perform surgery in his kitchen), but the rest of the restaurant needs to be beautiful. The grand opening of Pawit’s Royal Cuisine was nothing short of artwork.

He had a small staff the opening night and the restaurant was full, so our meal took a couple of hours to complete. We were happy to wait because it was the first time in months that we were able to eat his delicious Massaman Curry and Num Tok Salad. We sipped our Thai Iced Teas and enjoyed the appetizers.

When the food came, we weren’t disappointed. The curry was spicy and creamy. The Num Tok was a refreshing salad of beef and mint. The sticky rice was perfect. The mango and sweet sticky rice was moist and delicious. Once we asked Pawit how he found the best mangoes and he said, “I go all over the city looking for the best. I found these ones at Costco.” He was so proud of his find. Mike and I can never find fresh mangoes in the city, but Pawit keeps searching until he does.

When you come to Salt Lake City, Utah, you cannot leave until you’ve tried Pawit’s Royal Thai Cuisine. It’s the kind of restaurant that is a testament to Salt Lake City’s diversity.

Pawit’s Royal Thai Cuisine
1968 East Murray- Holladay Road, Salt Lake City, Utah 84117 Google Map
Phone: 801-277-39658

Hours:

Lunch: 11:30 am – 3:00 pm
Dinner: 5:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Friday and Saturday close at 10:00 pm
Closed Sunday

This quick little article from About.com gives a pretty good list for the best hamburgers in Salt Lake City.

• Best Places for Hamburgers in Salt Lake City

My personal favorite is Crown Burger. They have the best pastrami burgers in the area piled high with pastrami on top of ground beef patty. Add their onion rings with fry sauce and you have the greasiest meal in the city.

Enjoy!

I am always interested to see what magazines recommend as the top gadgets. What does Fortune Magazine think is important when you’re traveling? See here:

• Fortune Magazine – 12 great travel gadgets – Jul. 28, 2006

For their top 12 travel gadgets, they have chosen an interesting list of items:

• The Garmin GPSmap 60CSx handheld mapping system: A GPS system is better than a map when you’re in an unfamiliar area. It uses information from sattelites to find where you are in the world and then place you on the map. You can type in where you want to go and it will take you there. This is a great choice, actually. It’s not the most expensive unit available, but it isn’t bottom of the line either. Good choice.

• Uniden GMR 1588-2CK two-way radios: Cellular phones have replaced walkie-talkies like these for me. I have so many minutes that I NEVER go over now, so I have no issue with just picking up my cell phone and calling my sister in the car ahead of us telling her that we need to stop in Fillmore, Utah for a potty break. The only problem is cell coverage isn’t universal. When we go camping, we bring the walkie-talkies out of storage because we know that our phones won’t work in Devil’s Kitchen. We got ours for less than half the price of these, though. Shop around for a better deal than $60 for a pair. Try these instead: Motorola T5500AA GMRS / FRS 8-Mile Two-Way Radio

• Bose QuietComfort 3 noise-canceling acoustic headphones: Flying can be noisy. If you’re trying to listen to a movie on your laptop or listen to music on your iPod, the sound of the engine can drown out your music. Noise-canceling headphones counteract the noise of the engine and make your flight quieter, even if you’re NOT listening to music. They won’t cancel out the jerk talking loudly to his assistant or the crying kid in the back, but they will make your flight a little quieter. You don’t need these 350 dollar monstrocities, though. You can get a good set of noise-canceling headphones for about 60 bucks. Try these instead: JVC HANC100 Noise Cancelling Headphones

• <img align=”right” src=”http://www.starling-travel.com/wp-content/PhillipsDVD.jpg” alt=”Philips PET320 3.5\” Portable DVD Player” />Philips PET320 portable DVD player: There are so many choices for tiny little DVD players, that I don’t know how they chose this one. Phillips is a really good brand and at only $139, it’s a pretty good price (although I’ve seen this Coby DVD Player for less than $90). If you can’t watch movies on your laptop, a portable DVD player like this makes sense. If you’re taking a long road trip with children, a portable DVD player and a stack of children’s movies could be a sanity-saving device.

• Otterbox iPod case and H20 Audio waterproof headphones: I consider this one to be completely worthless. If you’re out and about in the water on your vacation, enjoy the water. You don’t need your iPod with you at all times. Enjoy the sound of the water against the earth and save yourself 150 bucks.

• Fujitsu LifeBook Q2010 ultraportable computer: Sure, this computer is tiny, but if you want to use a DVD, you have to buy the dock or buy a USB DVD drive. A computer for travel really needs a DVD player so you can watch movies on the plane or in the car. Otherwise, this is great little computer. Sometimes it’s worth buying the slightly bigger version to get all the features you want, though.

• Altec Lansing inMotion iM9 portable iPod speakers: Turn your iPod into a ghetto blaster. That’s what this $200 gadget does. That $200 doesn’t include the iPod, by the way. I don’t really think this is the best choice. I saw a really cool version of this that was only $35 at my local store. Sure, the speakers aren’t Altec Lansing, but when you’re sitting out in the boat listening to music, the audio quality isn’t as important as the ability to share the noise.

• APC UPB10 Mobile Power Pack: I’m trying to think how this gadget could be useful. It provides 50 hours of battery time for an iPod (or other USB charged device). Whenever I am unable to charge my gadgets with electrical power from the hotel, I usually have the car with me. Instead of this $70 box, I recommend a Xantrex Technologies 851-0400 X-Power 400 Power Inverter. I got mine for about $40 and I can plug in my laptop, iPod or any other device into the plug that gets juice from my car. It’s great for camping.

• Voltaic solar-power backpack: Yet again, this sounds like a really cool thing, but I can’t see a use for it. I like the idea of being able to charge my portable devices using the power of the sun already beating down on me, but I don’t really spend that much time outdoors without power, even when I’m traveling. Maybe when I was a teenager and I listened to music on my Sony Walkman all day long, I could have used a backpack like this. Maybe if you are backpacking in the woods without your car, it might be useful, but for $250, I think I’ll pass and use the car power inverter.

• Sony DCR-DVD505 Handycam video camcorder: I haven’t been impressed with the Sony Handycam series, so I wouldn’t recommend them right now. Plus, those little DVDs only hold about 20 minutes of video. If you’re willing to deal with that limitation, you could use the Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD1 5.1MP MPEG-4 High Definition Camcorder w/10x Optical Zoom. It stores the video on SD cards and is also an excellent still camera. Plus, it’s far more portable than a big camcorder. Who wants to lug that thing around all day? With the Sanyo, you can keep it in your pocket when you’re not using it.

• Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H2 digital camera: Another questionable choice. If you’re trying to take a picture to win awards, then this camera might be good, but the a Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD1 5.1MP MPEG-4 High Definition Camcorder w/10x Optical Zoom is much more portable, is a video camera, a still camera, and it fits in your pocket. If you’re traveling in order to take award winning pictures, then the Sony is great, but save yourself $600 and go with a two-in-one camera like the Sanyo.

• RaySat StealthRay two-way satellite antenna: Fortune says this item is for the family with everything, but at $36,000, it’s completely out of the range of logical. Sure, it provides Internet access to your car or RV no matter where you are, but at that price, you could buy a Toyota Prius just for road trips and save on gasoline. With $36K to spend, I could think of a lot more interesting things to purchase for traveling than the RaySat.

In short, the Fortune recommendations hit two out of twelve times. I guess that’s what we get for getting travel-gadget ideas from a magazine that has nothing to do with gadgets or travel.