Kasalong Thai Restaurant serves a broad, classic Thai menu from 288 Queen Street in Richmond, Tasman, opening every day of the week from 11:30 am to 8:00 pm. The kitchen covers everything from quick lunch plates to full dinner courses, with entrees, soups, salads and curries woven throughout - enough ground to suit a solo bowl of noodles or a table full of shared dishes.
The most distinctive thing about the menu is its flexibility: nearly every stir-fry, noodle dish, curry and fried rice can be built on your choice of chicken, pork, beef, vegetarian tofu, crispy chicken, crispy pork or prawn and mixed seafood. Dishes marked (G) offer a gluten-free option and those marked (V) a vegan version, with a simple request to note any dietary need in your order message.
A few plates carry the house name with pride - the Kasalong yellow curry, the young coconut crispy chicken with panang lava sauce, and the house-named Kasalong wings among the entrees. Dinner adds massamun lamb shank, Thai salads like larb and som tum, and seafood dishes from choo chee salmon to yum talay. Online ordering runs on a simple pick-up system: choose your items, confirm to receive an order number, then collect and pay at the shop.
Kasalong Thai Restaurant cooks from a big, confident Thai menu at 288 Queen Street in Richmond, Tasman, and it does so every day of the week from 11:30 am until 8:00 pm. The offering stretches from quick lunch plates to full dinner courses, with entrees, soups, salads and curries woven throughout - enough ground to cover everything from a solo bowl of noodles to a table full of shared dishes.
The most useful thing to know about Kasalong is how flexible the kitchen is. Nearly every stir-fry, noodle dish, curry and fried rice can be built on the protein you prefer: chicken, pork, beef, vegetarian tofu, crispy chicken, crispy pork or prawn and mixed seafood. One line on the menu, in other words, becomes a dozen different dinners.
The lunch list runs through the Thai canon - krapao basil-chilli stir-fries, cashew nut, peanut sauce, ginger, sweet and sour, black pepper - alongside noodles such as phad thai, drunken phad khi mao and soy-glazed phad zi-iew, and fried rice in green curry, Thai, Hawaiian, krapao and chilli jam styles. Lunch soups cover tom yum and creamy coconut tom khar, while the noodle soup section is a destination of its own: duck broth noodles, slow-cooked beef noodle soup, chicken broth noodles, yen ta fo with mixed seafood, nam tok beef and rad na.
Come dinner, those dishes step up in size and the kitchen adds more. Salads run from crispy chicken and spicy rib-eye beef to larb, nam tok, yum talay, Thai vermicelli salad, yum salmon and som tum. There are dinner-only soups such as tom yum nam khon and fiery tom zab with stewed beef brisket or pork ribs, and specials including spicy beef with cream cheese, garlic prawns (koong kratiem), lemongrass stir-fry, tom yum stir-fry and choo chee salmon.
A few plates carry the Kasalong name for good reason. The Kasalong yellow curry is the restaurant's namesake curry, made with your choice of protein. Young coconut crispy chicken with panang lava sauce appears on both the lunch and dinner menus - crispy chicken served over young coconut with a rich panang sauce. The massamun lamb shank is the dinner menu's gentle centrepiece: a full lamb shank in massamun curry. Leading the entree list are the house-named Kasalong wings, alongside honey ribs, crispy calamari, fish cakes, chicken curry puffs, chicken satay, coconut-battered prawn, roti with peanut sauce and Thai chicken toast.
Seafood gets genuine attention too, from pla pad prig pao (fish in roasted chilli paste) and pla sarm rod in three-flavour sauce to yum talay, yum salmon and choo chee salmon. Curry lovers are well covered beyond the signatures, with green, red and panang curries, traditional Thai pineapple curry, kang ped yang and massamun with chicken, pork, beef or stewed beef.
Dietary needs are handled openly: dishes marked (G) offer a gluten-free option and those marked (V) a vegan version, with a simple request to note any requirement in your order message. One caveat worth remembering - crispy chicken cannot be made gluten free.
Kasalong runs a tidy online ordering system. Step one: select your items and add them to the basket. Step two: confirm the order and fill in your details, and you will receive an order number. Step three: bring that number to the Queen Street shop, collect your food and pay. That is the whole process - handy for dinner on the way home, lunch in a break, or feeding a group without waiting around.
Extras round things out: jasmine or coconut rice, roti, fried eggs, side salads, stir-fried vegetables, peanut sauce, and add-ins of tofu, cashews, vegetables, meat or seafood whenever you want a dish boosted. For Richmond locals, it adds up to a dependable formula - a broad, flexible Thai menu open seven days, house dishes you will not find everywhere, and a pick-up system that respects your time.