Sa-Bai-Dee

I really like this restaurant. Their food is very fresh price is very reasonable. This is the most delicious I had ever eaten! The service is also very good! Environment is very beautiful! I’ll be back

Chrissy and I absolutely love this place. Excellent Thai food, great prices, nice atmosphere.

Their Thai iced coffee is out of this world. We’ve been here a few times. The food is always superb & the staff very attentive. On top of that they are so inexpensive!

One of the best choices for Thai food in the area.
Probably my favorite tom kha and tom yum soup is served here. The curry is always phenomenal. Top notch Thai! Bonus points for BYOB.

Loved our dinner here. Started with the Som Tum Laos, unlike anything I’ve had. It’s green papaya salad but with a specific salty crab funk. Delicious and nice to try something new. The chu chee duck sauce was spicy, creamy and a little sweet. Perfect combination with crispy duck and steamed vegetables. Hubby enjoyed the crispy tofu, spring rolls and pineapple fried rice w chicken. We’ll be back for the mango sticky rice dessert. Great server too– helpful but not at all pushy. We were very impressed with Sai ba Dee!

The best Thai food around! Love this place and we eat the curry and noodles and soups at least once every single week. Super nice staff as well! Highly recommended!!!

Sa-​Bai-​Dee is one of my old haunts, and I highly recommend it. The food is beyond excellent, and super cheap to boot!
Their Crispy Tofu appetizer and Masaman Curry entrée just might be my favorite compared to all other Thai places in the area.
They are usually not that busy, which makes me think this place is a hidden gem

Two words! Massaman Curry! I thought I went to heaven.

We arrived 30 minutes before their posted closing time. When we entered we were asked if we were going to take long. What?! Your food isn’t good enough to treat people poorly. Not by far.

I went to this restaurant for lunch upon seeing good reviews. When me and my girl friend got there, the place was pretty empty, so we got seated and served fast. I like the interior; it was dark, but created a Homey mood to it. I got the spicy noodles with chicken and my girlfriend got the seafood noodles. Wow! They were both really spicy, something I wasn’t expecting, and was really good to boot. The seafood noodles had flat noodles and seafood which included shrimp and imitation crab.
If you want good, cheap Thai food, I would totally recommend this place. It also is really spicy, and is quite a change of pace from the other nearby restaurants!

I think this place is excellent! I’m from NYC and love me so Thai food. The prices are very fair and the quality of the food is great. I got the food pretty quick and it was a very stress less environment. Overall, I would strongly recommend this restaurant and will definitely come back.

I can’t believe I waited so long to post my review. Fortunately, I remember that all that I had was delish! I had a Thai iced coffee cause it’s a requirement when having Thai and it was spot on!
I also had a bowl of Yum Tom soup, very coconutty and pad Thai. Very good and filling. It was a nice night (actually, was a super rainy night) but having a full belly, required a nice walk home.
I don’t typically go out to eat alone, but being that it was a business trip, I had too cause I was super hungry. Fortunately, among so many restaurants, I picked this one and glad I did because I felt completely at ease in this restaurant. The waitstaff was super accomodating for a single guest and very friendly.

My boyfriend and I are always looking for new places to eat and are pretty adventurous eaters. We’ve recently decided to try and look for restaraunts thats serve thai-​lao cuisine. We thought that it would be interesting because I am thai/​lao. Ive never eaten out anywhere that serves lao food because Im so use to my familys homecooking and the few things I know how to cook.
We settled on this place because it served one of my favorite childhood dishes, kao piek sen, which my boyfriend also now loves. It was pretty good but a little disappointing only because instead of using fresh hand made noodles from rice flour and tapioca flour, which I was taught as a child, they used udon noodles instead. Another interesting thing about the dish was that it was made with pork and not chicken. Not to say that it wasnt good but just a different version of the noodle soup bowl I’m so use to.
Next, we also ordered the beef laarp. My boyfriend is obsessed with laarp especially the raw shrimp version, which he asks me to make all the time lol. I absolutely loved it. All the flavors were right except it was a little bit saltier than what Im use to. Other than that it was savory and delicious. It had the right amount of spice for anyone to eat and just enough kick to keep you wanting more.
Overall the experience and food were wonderful. The staff was friendly and food decent. I would definitely stop by again when I’m in the area.

I love love love this place… Philly alone needs more Laotian restaurants! This place is pretty authentic! Love their Tum muk Hoong (Lao papaya salad)! Great nam ka dook moo with sticky rice and their basil fried rice is my favorite NOTE: (one time they gave me old clumpy fried rice that had to be thrown out) but other than that one time its been great the whole two dozen other times I’ve been here. Love their Thai ice tea too and their deep fried Fish is amazing! The Service is really good too… very friendly Servers.

Delicious food! I love coming back for the Tom Yum soup and noodle dishes. The desserts are amazing!
Love the staff!

The food here is good, but that needs to be qualified because, THERE IS NO GOOD THAI FOOD IN PHILADELPHIA.
Here’s what I ordered:
Fried shrimp cakes — Just like you would expect. Squeaky texture.
Pad Se Ew — Good, nicely seasoned, not over-​sauced, comforting, pillowy noodles, lots of chicken.
Yellow Curry (tofu) — Lots of colorful vegetables, not too hot, not too sweet, rich sauce.
Basil (Chicken) — Lots of vegetables, mostly peppers, salty delicious thin, not too sweet sauce. Could have been spicier.
We finished all of it. It was delicious.
All that being said, this is competent Thai food. It is not great, but it seems excellent in comparison to the rest of the Thai food in Philly. In NYC, it would be average. Some of the other Unilocal reviews compare this restaurant to Thai food they have had in other cities. You can’t compare because that food will always be better. Again, I don’t know why.
Also the restaurant’s subtitle is Thai-​Laos food. This implies Issan cuisine, which is the cuisine of Northeastern Thailand. That is not the case. This is the cuisine of central Thailand, which is to say Bangkok. I suspect that the owners are from Northeastern Thailand, but they aren’t making that food. The restaurant would have to close if that’s the food they cooked. Americans are completely unfamiliar with it.

Back again, Sa-​Bai-​Dee is awesome!
Just tried the Thai Shrimp Cake, an excellent appetizer, perfectly fried with a refreshing dipping sauce. YUM!

Getting into a very philosophical mood as I write this review. If one goes to a restaurant with high expectations and if the restaurant doesn’t deliver, the disappointment is even worse than if one never had any expectations to begin with.
Note to self — Regardless of what the reviews say, always go to a restaurant with a blank slate.
As for the reason why we were disappointed:
We used to go to this Lao-​Thai restaurant in Milwaukee on Farwell Ave that used to serve amazingly tasty and extremely fiery food that we were hooked onto like crack addicts! After visiting many restaurants in the tri-​state area, we found a couple of restaurants that really did justice to Thai food and in this particular case, we were hoping to find some really good Laotian and Lao-​Thai fare but alas some of the dishes that they served the night we were here really fell flat on their face.
We mentioned to the wait staff while placing our order that we are used to bold, pungent flavors and mouth numbing spice levels that are characteristic of food in North-​East Thailand (the Isaan region) and in Laos and that we’d like to see the real McCoy. Ordered a Tom Zap soup, a Som Tum salad and a green curry (for us) and a Tom Kha soup and a Pad See Eww (for my mother in law because she doesn’t eat too spicy lately).
The Tom Zap soup was pretty decent with chunks of stewed beef in a broth that had notes of kaffir lime leaves, lemon grass and garlic but we felt that it was a little too mildly spiced for our palate. The beef was delicious though.
The Som Tum Thai arrived next. One bite of the salad revealed that they had totally skimped on the nam pla (fish sauce) and the bird chillies. It was akin to listening to an opera performance with a muted singer. We mentioned it to the waitress and she came back with some nam prik pla and some red chilly powder and gave us an explanation that in the past they used to make it very spicy and some of the patrons would return the dish saying that it’s too spicy or complain that their stomach hurt the next day.
The Pad See Eww (which is a mild chinese influenced Thai noodle dish) was very flavorful and had a very nice smoky flavor. Loved this particular plate.
The Green curry was very mild and on the sweeter side. Nothing close to a real good Thai green curry. I feel my wife makes a better green curry at home after learning to make it from scratch.
We were thinking of placing a to-​go order for the Larb but dropped the idea after our initial dining experience. It took us a little more than an hour to get here and the verdict is that we were pretty disappointed.

I walked pass this place and walked back. Wanted to try because it said «Laotion and Thai Food» Place is small and clean.
We had the waitress with really short hair. I didn’t get her name but she was sweet and delightful. Very pleasant.
Here’s my order. Two Thai tea (very good), thai sausage and a side of sticky rice (excellent), seafood sukiyaki (good), yen tur Fue — tomato base flat rice noodle soup (good) and mango and coconut rice for desert (good).
Food was very good over all. Price was very reasonable. I would highly recommend this place. Thai and Lao food are very pungent in flavor. After eating from here, it is truly the authentic flavors of Lao and Thai food. I would know. I’m from both of those countries.

This restaurant is easy to give a rating to. Sa Bai Dee is def five stars!
Laotian food is awesome and they serve up genuine Laotian food here … (and northeastern Thai food as well.) But the most compelling reason to travel here is for their Laotian specialties. The Tom Kha soup is incredibly good and though you can have it traditional style with chicken, I had it in a shrimp variation. The national dish of Laos is undoubtedly Larb. Every Laotian housewife and grandmother has their own personal recipe and the one in this restaurant is tasty as well. You always have a choice of minced meat when ordering Larb and I chose the beef which was excellent — especially when you add in the fermented fish sauce and Sriracha sauce that are available at each table.
Desert is no letdown here. The banana and sticky rice rolled in rice paper and then lightly fried is the bomb. Order it.
Sa Bai Dee means hello or welcome in Lao. The wait staff make you feel so welcome from when they first serve you tea until you leave. The water glasses with a nice touch of lemon were constantly kept filled. The décor is simple (How about some Laotian art for the walls?) but the lighting is nice. The location in the international restaurant section of Upper Darby is a little out of the way for me but it’s well worth the effort to eat Laotian food at Sa Bai Dee. Consider yourself informed about this little gem!