Thai Smile 2 of Muncie, Indiana is a charming little restaurant featuring authentic Thai food. It’s a popular restaurant in the area, and for good reason. Let’s start with the facts. Like most traditional Thai restaurants, it does keep hours that aren’t traditional for American diners. Monday through Friday, the restaurant is open for lunch from 11:00 to 2:30 and for dinner from 5:00 to 9:00 p.m. Saturday, the restaurant is only open during dinner hours and the restaurant is closed altogether on Sundays. This mid-day break is very common, not only in Asia, but also in many European and South American countries. So make sure to go sometime before 2:00 in order to have enough time to enjoy your lunch during the week.
The interior of the Muncie restaurant is small, but it manages to feel cozy instead of cramped. Recently, it even expanded and now has another room to house guests. The decorations are bright, eclectic, and chipper, if not a little bit sparse. But you don’t go to restaurants for the view; you go for the food and the service. The service is always great and very efficient, especially during lunch hours on weekdays. This is because this is a hot spot for business lunches in the Muncie community.
The food is excellent. For starters, it’s often tough to find more authentic Asian cuisine anywhere, but especially in the mid-west. It’s typically a very Americanized version of the food with a more syrupy consistency and an overload of sauce. The recipes at Thai Smile are much better than your typical fare. Their food is based off of family recipes and are cooked with all fresh ingredients. Everything I have ever tried at the Thai Smile 2 has been excellent.
The menu is available at the Thai Smile 2 restaurant website, and it’s a good idea to look at the menu beforehand if you’ve never tried Thai cuisine before. There’s also a unique feature to this food in the sense that you can choose how spicy you want the food to be from a level of 0 – 5, no matter which dish you order. There is a particular spicy substance that they can add to your food, and when you choose the level, you are choosing the amount of spice that they will add. (Stay away from 5 unless you have a death wish!)
This is a truly great restaurant. I am a firm believer in the fact that anytime you can get away from the giant national chain restaurants, you absolutely should. Trying local, privately owned, unique restaurants can be great for dates, out of town guests, or business lunches. Thai Smile 2 is excellent in all of the above situations. I highly recommend it to anyone visiting the area, ask your hosts to take you here, you won’t regret it and neither will they. It’s one of Muncie’s best places to dine, even for local Ball State students, because the prices are manageable.
