Peep

OK so I’ve made a personal vow to myself to never eat at one of Jon’s restaurants again. I have already mentioned the over-use of cilantro and the well-done pork chop at Highline. Well, I should have known not to be expecting much, as the same chef heads up the kitchen at Peep, a modern Thai restaurant in Soho.

Only being able to order from the left side of the menu because I was sitting at the bar kind of pissed me off. The left side of the menu contained small “bar-sized” dishes like calamari, scallop canapés, and chicken satay.

I opted for the scallop canapés, a relatively easy decision with my love for scallops.


When the plate came out, two things that you can clearly notice in this photo immediately disappointed me:

1. They were tiny bay scallops
2. The scallops were fried…

Neither of these two (rather important) details was mentioned on the menu. I wouldn’t have ordered the dish if I knew even one of those two things. So I started eating anyway, and became increasingly disappointed with each bite. The scallops were greasy and whoever pulled them out of the fryer decided that salt isn’t really that big of a deal and was deemed unnecessary in this dish.

The coconut-peanut sauce was equally as bland and the filo dough (?) cups were soggy and appeared to have been made at the beginning of the week. The “tomato relish” that topped the dish was also featured on many other menu items, leading me to believe that it was Peep’s version of Emeril’s essence. It was an extremely disappointing plate of food.

Hoping that the kitchen would redeem itself I ordered the steamed emperor dumplings, which contained a mixture of both chicken and shrimp.



This was the third dish I had eaten from this chef, and now it was the third bad dish I have eaten by this chef (add Jason’s well-done pork chop and it’s 4).

Well for starters you can see the swimming pool of soy sauce that the “dumplings” are generously submerged in. That actually turned out to be a good thing though, as the overkill of soy sauce muted the terrible flavor of the filling.

Biting through one of the dumplings felt like biting through a meatball, that’s bad. Dumplings are supposed to be light and soft with a pleasant texture. These were rather heavy and unpleasant. I can still feel them sitting like rocks in my stomach a day later.

Only one good thing came out of my trip to Peep. That was the large amount of time I spent waiting for Jon to get off work while I used my fancy new phone to find a good, nearby late-night place to get some food, which I did…Blue Ribbon Sushi, I’m happy.