Rebecca H.
Yelp
I ordered delivery from Circles with my other half during an overnight shift earlier this evening. We're big Asian bitches (cuisine predilection, not ethnicity) so I'd hazard to guess that we've ordered from almost every Asian establishment in this city and thus have a formidable frame of reference.
The description under their name on caviar reads "Philadelphia's best Thai food" which I agree with only on the condition that every other Thai restaurant closed.
Menu variety is good, no complaints there. COB is under the weather at the moment and was jonesing for a brothy soup to soothe the throat. This place has a few soup options, better than the one soup option I saw elsewhere. Notably, there are an impressive quantity of roll options: standard vegetarian rolls, summer rolls which resemble Vietnamese ingredients/flavors, moving west with Thai rolls, CHEESESTEAK rolls, and I'm not joking you: VEGETARIAN CHEESESTEAK ROLLS. I didn't try any of these but holy shit.
There are also a copious amount of entrees: noodles, fried rice, curries, stir fries, etc etc literally everyone that dabbles with Asian food should be able to find something they like. Extra bonus points for the additional vegetarian option of seitan for many of their entrees. The vegetarian options are singlehandedly the reason for 3 instead of 2 stars.
Unfortunately the variety only goes so far when the food doesn't really taste good. We ordered penang curry with tofuwhich is a standard order for me almost every single time at every single place that offers it. Bae ordered the lemongrass soup, and to polish off our order, we got pad ped with seitan because stir-fried red curry with bamboo, bell peppers, basil, cream, peppercorns, and wild ginger sounded delicious.
The penang curry not only was completely unremarkable in flavor but was essentially a curry soup with a few peppers, green beans, and tofu wedges. The contents were so minimal that I almost finished the whole thing while I was waiting for my tofu wedge to finish her soup and had to stop myself to allow her to have some of it.
Upon peeling one corder of the pad ped's container lid a RUSH of odor resembling diapers escaped into the room and regrettingly our smell apparatus. Needless to say, this was mildly unappetizing. Who am I to let this stop me, however, and chopsticks in hand, I wrestled through 95% of the dish which was some beige substance resembling a hybrid of potato and squash (likely bamboo) to find an ingredient I was interested in eating. The seitan was good, but scarce. The flavor itself was acceptable, but not particularly satisfying. COB and I ate the scarce seitan and few bell peppers and green beans I could excavate from the mountains of bamboo.
To add insult to injury, the delivery fee on caviar is a whopping $5. I'd expect a somewhat decent-tasting meal for that kind of cheddar.
Ultimately this was a very disappointing meal and hopefully this experience will be memorable enough that we can avoid ordering this again although I'm not particularly confident given the fact that we accidentally order from places we've hated pretty regularly.
