The waitress was very friendly and helpful.  Apparently there’s a Betel methodology of menu ordering — it’s designed to be family style and shared.  For a party of 2:

• 3-4 appetizers
• a salad to “cleanse the palate”
• 1 entrée to share

I think Thai food offers such a beautiful range of flavors in its cuisine, and often it’s the combination of these flavors in a single dish that makes this one of my favorite genres of food to eat.  It’s that tangy + sweet + spicy + herby combo that is so wonderful to experience in Thai food.
Unfortunately, Betel didn’t deliver that.  Maybe it was the dishes we ordered, but it seemed like the same flavors kept regurgitating on our plates: deep spicy, toasted garlic slivers, coconut, coconut, coconut and MORE coconut.  (don’t get me wrong, I love me some coconut, but it can be very overpowering in some dishes)
The presentation and plating were beautiful.  But again, Flavor over Frills.
The drink menu was longer than the actual dinner menu (3 pages!). And the restaurant — while very chic-fully decorated — was SO LOUD.  Unlike other “modern” Thai restaurants, there was no trance/world music thumping, but the acoustics in the space somehow exacerbated the volume of everyone’s voices.
I spent the entire evening was spent shouting, “WHAT?! What did you say?”  I dunno — call me an Old Lady, but I like going to dinner with friends and being able to have a conversation with them.
Also, I think lighting is SO instrumental in a good dining experience.  I appreciate “ambience”, but I DO like being able to see what I’m eating.  Betel was a little too dimly lit to appreciate (or discern) what exactly was on your plate.
Between the noise level and the low lights, I might as well have been deaf & blind, eating my trendy interpretive Thai food.
Here’s the menu:

• Drink Menu: page 1, page 2, page 3
• Appetizers & Salads
• Entrées and Desserts

Here’s a plate-by-plate of our meal:
BEVERAGES:

• BLACKBERRY PASSIONFRUIT CAIPIROSKA: 42 below Passionfruit Vodka, lime, blackberries, palm sugar. I read on Yelp that their drinks were disappointing, but I actually thought the opposite — it may have been the best part of the meal. This was delicious — fruity, but not overly sweet. SEOULDIVA SAYS: ♥♥♥♥ / ♥♥♥♥♥

• THE GINGER MANUKA: Evan Williams Bourbon, 42 below Manuka honey, ginger syrup, lime, ginger ale. This was really delicious & fresh.  The honey flavor was very prominent, and the ginger was not overpowering. But it did feel like ”Isn’t this a cough drop” flavor for me… SEOULDIVA SAYS: ♥♥♥ / ♥♥♥♥♥

APPETIZERS:

• VEGETARIAN BETEL LEAF w/ caramelized coconut, lemongrass mint & peanuts. There were 2 versions of the Betel Leaf app on the menu and we opted for the vegetarian one, since our other selections were so meat-heavy.  I was underwhelmed.  Refreshing? YES.  Rabbit food?  DEFINITELY.  It felt like I was stuck on the Island of LOST, and I was foraging for food, and this is all I could come up with. NOTICE: the caramelized coconut. SEOULDIVA SAYS: ♥ / ♥♥♥♥♥

• GRILLED BO LA LAT with Vietnamese mint & red nahm jim. I didn’t know what this dish was, but the waitress said something about “ground marinated beef” so we ordered!  The beef was tasty — marinated in a sweet-soy flavor.  The entire dish was actually very reminiscent of Korean ssam, where you take the piece of kalbi (also sweet-soy marinated beef), put it in a red lettuce leaf with some sauce and shove it in your mouth.  Be warned – the dipping sauce is no joke. MUY PICANTE. SEOULDIVA SAYS: ♥♥♥ / ♥♥♥♥

• SCALLOP & CILANTRO DUMPLINGS w/ garlic chives and chili oil. Two things about this dish:  1) When I see an ampersand between two ingredients before the word “dumpling” it implies that both those are ingredients are INSIDE the dumpling.  Is it just me? Wasn’t expecting the cilantro to be sprigs strewn on top as garnish.  2) There’s no such thing as an “al dente” dumpling, but when the skin is SO soft that it crumbles, that means over-cooked.  no one likes a limp dumpling. Overall this was underwhelming. The scallop stuffing didn’t have much flavor and it came swimming in a non-descript, watered-down pool of soy. SEOULDIVA SAYS: ♥ / ♥♥♥♥♥

SALAD:

• POACHED CHICKEN AND CRAB SALAD w/ coconut, cherry tomatoes and green nahm jimm dressing. This came to our table and did not look appetizing — didn’t taste much better either.  First off – the poaching of the meats rendered them devoid of any flavor.  I have NO idea what the “dressing” was — whatever that white mess was, it made the entire salad look like slaw.  PLEASE NOTE: the coconut. Unfortunately, all I could taste was the damn coconut. SEOULDIVA SAYS: Ο / ♥♥♥♥♥

ENTRÉES:

• JUNGLE CURRY OF SNAPPER w/ baby corn, spring onion, snake bean and fried garlic. I wish they had offered those little chili pepper icons on the menu, next to the dishes to denote which were spicy — this one shoulda had 3 chili peppers next to it.  I absolutely adore spicy food, but I don’t like it when it’s SO spicy that you can’t taste any other flavors in the dish.  While this dish wasn’t that bad, it was dangerously close.  I didn’t understand the baby corn (but then again, I never do), and the snapper was mediocre.  It was all heat, with no substance supporting it.  A little more salt would have been welcome. SEOULDIVA SAYS: ♥♥ / ♥♥♥♥♥

• CARAMELIZED BRAISED BEEF RIB w/ cilantro chili shallot & nahm plah prik. A picture’s worth a thousand words, ain’t it? I didn’t know it at the time, but look at that HUGE bubble of fat in the middle of that photo!  Now, as a meat-loving Korean, I love me some beef rib.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t as tender and fall-off-the-bone as I normally prefer.  Nor was it well-seasoned.  Without the dipping sauce (which tasted vinegar-based), there was just a whisper of marinade.  I also found the meat extremely fatty. SEOULDIVA SAYS: ♥ / ♥♥♥♥♥

DESSERTS:

• BETEL’S ICE CREAM AND SORBET:  First scoop was red bean, second scoop mango…third scoop some sort of sugarless citrus.  Truthfully, all the flavors tasted watered down. NOTE: Yes, that’s coconut sprinkled across the entire dish.  SEOULDIVA SAYS: ♥ / ♥♥♥♥♥

• STEAMED CARAMELIZED DUCK EGG CUSTARD w/ star anise and cassia bark ice cream. I guess I was expecting an actual custard.  Perhaps something flan-like, with some inventive caramel top.  Instead, we got brown molasses-like substance in a bowl that just tasted like dark syrup.  SOOOOO sweet — inedible.  It was marginally more tolerable if you took a spoonful of the ice cream (which, might I add — had COCONUT shavings AGAIN) and dipped it into the “custard”, but it was still WAY too sweet to withstand more than one bite.  I have no idea where the alleged “duck egg” was…all I got was a bowl of syrup. SEOULDIVA SAYS: Ο / ♥♥♥♥♥