tamarind is more of a sour taste, are you thinking of the palm sugar? it has a different taste to plain ol' white sugar.

This thread is making me hungry.

The original plan was to go to the gym tonight. Now I'm debating whether to go out for Thai food, barbeque or head to the beach for a couple boat drinks and a plate of grouper.

Decisions, decisions.

They dont actually use Thai ingredients, but american ones

Americans do have a bit of sweet tooth. For example, the dishes served in New York's Sichuan restaurants invariably have sweetness to them, whereas the same dishes in Chengdu and Chongqing are completely devoid of it. A cook at a popular Sichuan place in Chelsea (9th Av) told me once that they would have long been out of business if they hadn't sweetened their dishes to suit the local palate.

That said, Southeast Asian cuisines tend to be sweet. That's not so much an American thing. The sugarcane originally came from India, which has important influences on Thai culture and cuisine. Malaysia relies more on palm sugar. I once had pad Thai in a street market outside Bangkok that was garnished with coarse granulated sugar. If anything, Americans would probably object more to that gritty texture than a dish prepared without much sweetness.

Amazing number of stereotypes thrown around in this thread, most of them pretty biased. Not all Americans like "sweet" food and some of us even know the difference between PF Changs and authentic Asian cuisines. Heck, we can even tell the difference between the different Asian cuisines!

Neither bread nor pad thai needs to be noticeably sweet. When I make pad thai, I tend use more sour than sweet in the sauce. I'm sure balsamic vinegar isn't authentic, but we think it goes well with it because we prefer the sour/tart taste to sweet with fresh vegetables.

Best place I've found in the U.S. for Thai food is in Delray (sp?), Virginia, just outside DC. Enough garlic in that stuff to keep the vampires away for a year. ;)