Ithaca, New York--A Great College Town

Ithaca is bursting with opportunities for activity. Home of Ithaca College and Cornell University, Ithaca offers great ethnic food, shopping, museums, concerts, and other activities.

Quick Tips:

Two great areas of Ithaca are The Commons and Collegetown. The Commons is a two block pedestrian area filled with specialty clothing, book, art, music, and cooking stores, and great restaurants serving everything from Pizza to Mexican food to Thai cuisine. Collegetown is located at Cornell University and there are many restaurants there as well as small grocery stores, a video rental, and a couple of laundromats. Both areas are great places to eat and walk around. I recommend The Commons for families and those that want to do some fun shopping as well as eat great food.

Best Way To Get Around:

Choose an area of Ithaca that looks most interesting to you then park your car and walk around and explore.

Relaxing with friends on a spring evening, having dinner with family, going out on your first date, and celebrating an anniversary are all great reasons to go to Taste of Thai. The food is amazing, the atmosphere is friendly and relaxed, the menu offers many, many choices, and the prices are reasonable. What more could a person ask for?

The pad Thai served here is the best pad Thai I've ever eaten: the rice noodles are cooked to perfection, the bean sprouts are served on the side so you can mix in as many or as few as you want, the shrimp is tender instead of chewy, and the peanuts add just the right amount of crunch to the dish.

For an appetizer, you could try tom kha soup or chicken satay. The tom kha soup has a coconut milk broth filled with mushrooms and your choice of meats or tofu, and is spiced according to your preferences (the scale is 0 to 5, five the hottest; for me, 2 was spicy but not too spicy, though it did make my nose run). The chicken satay is tender and flavorful in a way that can only be described fully by your tongue—words don't do it justice. The chicken is served on wooden skewers with two sauces, peanut and cucumber relish.

Taste of Thai is one of my favorite restaurants in Ithaca. In addition to great food, atmosphere, and prices, Taste of Thai has a great location on The Commons, a 2-block stretch of shops and restaurants for pedestrians only.