I HAVE discovered nothing ruins the mood of a tranquil Thai restaurant quite like the sound of revving engines and a procession of gawking drivers looking at you as you eat.

It says something about the food at Abingdon's Hugomango's then that I was (mostly) able to look past it's less-than-ideal location next to a set of traffic lights on Ock Street and am already planning a return visit.

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Though this time I will be facing away from the window.

Oxford Mail:

Things did not get off to a promising start when the restaurant initially appeared deserted, with no one to greet me but a confused chef who stared in bafflement before scurrying back into the kitchen without so much as a hello.

Soon a pair of women joined me though and we were able through sheer force of will to conjure a bored-looking waiter.

From here things started to look up.

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An appealingly straight forward and reassuringly limited menu was presented to me with a spice rating for each dish given out of nine.

This was especially useful because my general tolerance hovers somewhere around a Korma (ie non existent) for Indian food and can stretch only a little further for Thai cuisine.

A deceptive dish described only as 'steamed seabass lemon' for instance had an alarming rating of nine and I went with a classic Thai Chicken Green Curry (£11.99) rated a much more manageable five.

For a starter I opted for prawn dim sum (£5.45) which came as four pieces with a black sauce.

Oxford Mail:

They were small but packed with flavour and the thick soy sauce was so fragrant it hit you as soon as the plate was placed down.

I was left hoping the portion had been bigger if only to have more things to dip in the sticky sauce.

There were then several fraught moments while waiting for the curry when the (American?) diners on the next table brought up Trump and I had a sequence of awkward staring encounters with motorists, but it wasn’t long before my main meal appeared and I was too taken with the coconut rice to care.

For an extra £2 you can substitute the regular steamed rice for either egg fried, coconut or sticky rice.

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As a fan of the mixing of savoury and sweet (firmly in the 'pineapple belongs on pizza' camp) there was only one option.

The sweet coconut was a glorious pairing with the building heat of the green curry, which was teaming with flavour from the Thai eggplants, basil and lime leaves as well as green chillies. Spicy enough to leave my lips tingling but not so much it drowned out the other flavours.