Rice Palace

I’m very pleased to have found this place on Unilocal.I was in town for work and craving great Asian food. I was surprised how many people were here for a late lunch (2pm). Second thing I noticed was the speed of the kitchen. I ordered an egg roll and wings to start. Fresh out of the fryer, my food came out quickly. If you like sauces and spicy, the hotpepper fish sauce was excellent with the egg roll. The wings came out with their own spicy rub. Wasn’t too spicy. They were accompanied with their own dipping sauce. It was delicious. I like good Pad Thai, and this day was no different. I ordered it with shrimp. See my pictures. Very good food all the way around! I’ll be back!

This place is average.
It’s really only worth going to when there is a good special going on. Their $ 5 Pad Thai wednesday is solid, big portions and pretty decent. Their $ 5 Large Phở friday is a solid deal as well. They also have $ 1 egg rolls on saturday but their egg rolls are just okay, nothing compared to Egg Roll Plus. The location is great but the service isn’t, every time I stop in with friends they bring out one plate, then the next one a few minutes later, and so on, which can be uncomfortable.
Ride the specials. Otherwise avoid.

The décor is simple but overall clean. Service was friendly but very slow. It was obvious the chef was running solo.
The food was at best mediocre with some dishes not at all acceptable and just too salty.

We were just walking around looking for a place to eat and I’m happy we walked in! It blew my expectations out of the water. Got the Orange chicken and two egg rolls. Haven’t felt that satisfied from eating in a very long time. Our two meals only cost a total of $ 22 and I’ll be going back

Rice Palace is not actually a Thai restaurant: it’s a Hmong restaurant which sometimes pretends to serve American Thai food. It has two great virtues: it’s very inexpensive, and it’s interesting. As others have noted, the Thai-​style standards can be heavy and oily. Venture into the Hmong side of the menu, though, and you’ll be both surprised and satisfied.
Everyone should try the Hmong-​style egg rolls, which are big and stuffed with noodles, shreds of cabbage, and a choice of meat or more vegetable shreds, and the «grilled beef salad», which entails piles of meat mixed with bright green herbs and is served with sticky rice. If you’re willing to experiment, order the «steam rolls» appetizer, which is ground pork wrapped in gooey rice dough and served with a sauce apparently composed of fish sauce and green fire, or the whole fish steamed in an intensely aromatic lemongrass broth.
One warning: the spiciness scale makes no concession to Midwestern sensibilities. At some other places in Eau Claire, «hot» means «you might be able to detect the use of a pepper.» Here, it means «Your throat will be on fire.»

I stopped in here after finding the Indian restaurant across the street had sadly closed, and thought Thai would satisfy my craving for curry. My wife and I each ordered a different curry-​based dish, and also got fried bananas to split (get it?).
I must say, everything we ate was delicious, with balanced flavors and just the right amount of spiciness. Both dishes were also loaded with fresh cilantro on top, which immediately put them in a good light. I hate it when restaurants skimp on the cilantro. Pile that stuff on, friend.
I rarely feel that one visit is enough to truly rate a place, but we both loved the food. The one reason it’s not getting a full five-​star rating is that the service was pretty terrible. It was slow (although not slow enough to get me to complain or leave), and the food came out one plate at a time, with a few minutes in between each. The décor is almost nonexistent, and it’s quite a dive. Not dirty, just not fancy in any way. Looking at it from a positive angle, it just shows that they put all of their energy into the food. We saved a full meal of leftovers, and will definitely return in the future.

Thai cuisine is known to be both flavorful and colorful, but Rice Palace is sadly neither. I have given this place multiple chances and I am always disappointed by the amount of oil on the plate and just how each time the mark is missed on what Thai cuisine is and should be.

If I could, I would give them zero stars. That’s how bad this restaurant is, in my opinion. I have been here twice; the first time was merely to try the steamed rolls, but they were very oily and didn’t taste very well. I thought I’d give it a second chance with a date; we ate the eggrolls, with the meat tasting very strange. But as soon as we got our entrees, we had our first bite and decided to complain and ask for a refund. All of the meat tasted somewhat like beer this second time, which was utterly strange.
I have been to quite a few Asian restaurants in my life, but wow, this is definitely as bad as it gets. If you are looking for somewhere to eat, go to Pizza Plus next door or go to Pad Thai (now Singha) down the street. Not spending my money here again.

I dont really know if they deserve stars. but hmm. Service very slow, food not great or good. I had the red curry w/​pork and it had good tasty broth but the meat and vegies had no taste and were way overcooked. He had drunken noodles that I thought was very oily and just lacked flavor. The giant spring roll was tasty (cant go wrong with raw vegies) except a slice of mystery meat like spam in it. It was just gross. I won’t be back. We had to flush the leftovers the next day, I just couldn’t eat it.

I was hesitating between a one– or a two-​star rating. Reading the descriptions helped me decide. Two stars is «Meh. I’ve experienced better» while one star is «Eek! Methinks not.» My trip to Rice Palace is more «eek» then «meh».
The main reason is how heavy and greasy the rice dish I got was. It was a simple fried rice dish. Most good fried rice I’ve had is going to have a little oil in it and slightly crispy rice. This rice was soft and the oil was a noticeable layer on the bottom of the plate. It was the overriding flavor of the dish.
The service was also poor. The waitress was ok at first, but once everything was out, she never came back. They do say to pay at the counter, but if you want another item, beverage, or anything else, you’d need to go hunting.
There were good parts of the experience. The beverages were good and one shining item was the spring roll. The shrimp spring roll was good and I’d suggest that one because the «pork» one contained something probably made from a pig, but I’d loosely call it pork. However, the entrée is the main reason to go and if it’s not good, why go?
That said, I’ll may go back again in the spring if they’re still around to see if the cooking has improved because I always give a place second chances. It has potential. But for now I’ll stick with Pad Thai down the street and Egg Rolls Plus across the river.

Quite solid! I’ve been to Rice Palace several times since they opened. I love authentic Thai food (and not boring old Americanized Pad Thai), and the dishes I’ve had at Rice Palace have been pretty darn good. Fresh veggies, excellent balance of flavors, and perfect rice /​noodles. The portions are gigantic, so you’ll definitely be taking some home. I wish they had more authentic dishes, but they’re doing great for Eau Claire!
I love getting their egg rolls at the farmer’s market too! Good stuff; get the spicy sauce!

Rice Palace — Not Ready for Prime Time
I love Thai food, and it is nice to have good Thai restaurants in both Eau Claire (Pad Thai) and Chippewa Falls (Mali Thai). So I was looking forward to some great food at the newest Thai restaurant in Eau Claire — Rice Palace. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed.
Setting was Friday evening, about 6pm. Not very busy, but with a decent crowd with customers coming in and out. The two of us ordered Tofu Pad Thai (mild) and Drunken Noodles with Pork (spicy). Prices are very reasonable and the food was delivered to our table fast. That was the only good thing about the meal.
Both items were very greasy — as in pooling oil on the plate greasy.
The Pad Thai had an overpower taste of anise — a common ingredient in Thai food, but not in Pad Thai, and it overpowered the dish. It also appeared to be comprised largely of just noodles, tofu and sauce — no egg, no onion, no peanuts on the top, no cilantro, no bean sprouts. I understand there are many ways to make this dish, but this was a bad way.
Drunken Noodles w/​pork was good, if also pooling in oil. Very spicy (which is how I ordered it, so points for getting that right) I do suggest that you try medium first.
Noodles for both dishes were cooked appropriately, but Thai food should never be pooling in oil. Never.
Rice Palace does have a limited beer selection
It was also one of the few times leftovers stayed on the plate and did not go home.

We were in downtown Eau Claire, and happened to notice that this place had just opened recently. My daughter and I decided to give it a try, since we were both big thai fans. Although I know that the first few weeks are needed to iron out the kinks in a business, a couple things stood out that caused me to wonder whether I should have given it a few more weeks before visiting…
The good: Extremely cheap, especially the appetizers/​rolls. We had enough food for three people, and the bill only came to $ 15. I can also happily say that the deep fried bananas were a delightful treat, and I would get those again (but I’m not sure about the authenticity of those in Thailand???).
The not-​so-​good: the taste of the food. I ordered my ol’ standbye favorite — Tofu Pad Thai. It’s like the burger in american food restaurants — if you can’t do that right, one starts to worry. I’ve never seen such colorless (and tasteless) pad thai before. To make it worse, everything was overcooked and gummy. We also ordered some shrimp rolls, egg rolls, and spring rolls. Again, everything seemed to be overcooked and extremely «gelatified». The wait staff was also a bit green (they didn’t know if they had knives, didn’t bring us water for 10 minutes), but I didn’t hold that against them, since they were new.
Perhaps I’ll give it another try in a month or so, in hopes that things have changed and been improved.