Ruth Tobias

One can’t help but feel a twinge of reverse ethnocentrism upon entering Phat Thai, can one? It sprawls, it gleams, it caters to the yoga-lean leisure class of Cherry Creek, & in short it’s the squeaky-clean antithesis of the tiny, gritty holes in the wall wherein most of us first fell for Thai food. Although the concept of authenticity is ever nebulous, each of the world’s cuisines does, at any given point in history, possess certain core characteristics by which it can be identified; Carbondale-based chef-owner Mark Fischer’s first Denver outpost looks a little too much like a glorified Chipotle for the comfort of one who fears that a hallmark of Thai cookery—its careful balance among spicy, salty, sour, sweet & herbaceous—may not translate against the paradoxically yet blandly colorful backdrop.

But that same one has hopefully done enough homework to know that Fischer’s no dummy—that Fischer himself would have done his homework before opening the first Phat Thai, & that even if he might put a contemporary twist on his menu here, a local spin there, & run a thread of flexibility to suit all manner of palates throughout, he’d remain essentially true to the tenets of the cuisine. That is in fact the case.

Indeed, while I’m inclined to adore the Soup Nazis of the world myself, one could argue that Thai cookery’s aforementioned hallmark is a matter of, if not compromise exactly, subjectivity rather than precision—what’s “balanced” to someone who’s sensitive to salt is going to differ from what’s balanced to a chile-head. In that light, I’m all for the table caddies equipped with containers of sugar, crushed red pepper, vinegar infused with sweet red pepper, & housemade nam pla, so that diners can doctor their dishes as they see fit—dishes that are already darn well balanced. Not that I didn’t add some seasonings here & there, but I did so in full recognition of the fact that my own palate is none too subtly in favor of salt, tartness, & heat over sweetness. (The only outright disappointment over the course of 2 meals was a bowl of phat si iew that both I & my companion found lacking in oomph, though the noodles had great texture. By contrast, whole tilapia took no prisoners w/r/t oomph.)

That palate was made for the simple but zingy appetizer of fresh green (as in young, unripe, hence tart) mango wedges (already half gone when I got around to snapping the below pic), served with chile-&-sugar-seasoned sprinkling salt.

And for the lovely herb salad with grilled calamari pieces & pomelo sections, topped with fried shallots & a dressing not unlike nam pla, plus a dollop of crème fraîche. Bitterness here, juiciness there, plus a touch of umami…intriguing all the way.

“Sticky” needn’t be a synonym for “cloying,” & here it thankfully isn’t; the 5-spice-dusted pork riblets are more aromatic than they are sweet per se, a trait that effectively cuts a bit of the fat too.

The red curry in which I swear an entire roast duck was bathed (that leg on top was just the beginning) was one of the things I did find myself adding a bit a salt & spice to; so velvety, so coconut-creamy, it was just a touch too sweet for me—though again, that doesn’t at all mean it was objectively too sweet. Rather, chunky with halved Thai eggplants (those cute round ones) & cherry tomatoes as well as bamboo shoots & gai lan (aka Chinese broccoli) & scented with kaffir lime & fried garlic, it was quite the elaborate, festive concoction—& the meat itself, in its luscious depth of flavor, just shone through it all. One of the best takes on duck I’ve had in some time.

Likewise dark & funky, goat, I’ve often thought (well, not often, but occasionally), is sort of the ungulate answer to duck. Kaeng massaman pae, or coconut-based goat curry with sweet potato, peanuts, tamarind, lemongrass & red chilies is no less lively for being wonderfully rich.

“Chicken basil” sounds boring. It isn’t. Decidedly on the savory rather than sweet end of the spectrum thanks to a blend of black soy & oyster sauce, gai lan, chilies, the namesake Thai basil & Thai chilies—a fried egg is the cherry on top—it’s much more multifaceted & flavorful than it has a right to be.

I didn’t try another companion’s phat thai with dried shrimp, tofu & turnips, but the visual suggests it’s no reluctantly proffered requisite; looks like it’s executed with care & panache to me.

It’s no fault of the kitchen that this photo of the fried rice I got to go is so ugly. The dish itself is tops; so often fried rice is blandly undergarnished, but here it’s almost cartoonishly chock-full of scrambled egg, chunks of sweet potato, bits of gai lan & scallion & jalapeño, & crushed peanuts, boldly splashed with both dark & sweet soy as well as fish sauce.

Whatever you get, trust me when I say you’d sure as shooting better wash it down with drinking vinegar in any of 4 flavors (I heart the tamarind). No, it’s not like taking a swig of straight acetic acid; both fruit-infused & sweetened, it’s also topped off with soda water, result being a light, bright, sweet-tart cooler. Chug, glug, smack lips, repeat.

They set it down before you very carefully, so that what you see is this:

But here’s what your companion gets an eyeful of:

Right on, Phat Thai! The stripped, chunked flesh is cornmeal-dredged & deep-fried with cubes of sweet potato & strips of red pepper, & the light brush of oil it all leaves on the bottom of the bowl, with minced garlic & Thai chilies…well, let’s just say one wishes it were a few millimeters deeper. (And that one had just the right starchy starch to soak it up—like Hawaiian sweet rolls. No, not rice, not even sticky rice. King’s.) Same goes for the dressing of fish & soy sauce, lime juice & cilantro—said companion & I discussed how we could get away with drinking it all by itself, &/or what spirit it might properly be paired with.

Full review to come.

***This review originally appeared on the website of now-defunct Denver Magazine; I’m posting it here as was—hence the wintertime references—along with an update.***

I’ve tried just about every Thai joint within a 5-mile radius of my house on the south side of town, & I’ve been disappointed by all of them. Let’s face it, the vast majority follow a generic formula that blurs regional distinctions & shifts the cuisine’s celebrated balance of spicy to salty to sour to sweet in favor of the latter to appeal to the American taste for sugar.

So I didn’t get my hopes up for Thai Pan. I’d peeked into the strip-mall storefront at the corner of South Colorado & East Mississippi once, & was vaguely amused by the mishmash of decorative elements so typical of such holes in the wall—a display of jewelry for sale here, a framed photo of the king of Thailand there, carved depictions of elephants (the national symbol) everywhere. But it was closed at the time, & I didn’t consider it again until last week, when the cold snap kept me home in my pajamas, delivery menus at the ready. Although Thai Pan’s menu was laden with the usual stirfries, curries, & noodle dishes, it also listed haw mok—a curried seafood custard rarely found in the repertoire of your average pad Thai peddler. So I went for it, steeling myself for a letdown.

Traditionally, the custard is well set, steamed and served in a “cup” of banana leaves. The container that arrived at my house was loosely set, even soupy. (Owner Panjama Cheewapramong tells me they serve it in a bowl even in-house.) But it was also chock-full of an array of fresh shellfish: huge green-lipped mussels, squid tentacles, firm bay scallops, plump shrimp. The aroma was wonderful, alerting me to the presence of lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, basil, mint, & chilies. And so was the first bite (& all the bites after that): the rich coconut-milk curry, invigorating whole-leaf herbs, soft egg, & slightly sour shredded cabbage all set off the shellfish in fine balance.

As delivered As served

So as not to incinerate its delicate flesh, I ordered the dish medium-hot, & I’m glad I did—because the spicy stuff I requested over the course of not just one but three delivery orders were sweat-inducing indeed. That includes the larb, an Isan (or Isaan, i.e., northeastern Thai) specialty. Eaten as a salad, it’s a mixture of ground meat, sliced onion, & herbs (namely mint & basil) that’s dressed with lime juice & red chili flakes & tossed with toasted rice powder for just a bit of crunch. I tried it with both pork and chicken, preferring the former for its juiciness.

In Thailand, larb is commonly served with sticky rice—an effective palate-soother, to be sure. But I got mine in the form of dessert. Sweetened with sugar, mixed with coconut milk, & served warm, black sticky rice forms a porridge that’s every bit as soulful as Indian kheer, British hasty pudding, its cornmeal-based American equivalent, or any other version made around the world—&, with its dramatic purple hue, a lot prettier.

As I curled up on my couch to polish it off, I realized with a grin that I’d finally found what I was looking for: a neighborhood go-to for comfort food, Thai-style.

***UPDATE: Months later, the Director & I have ordered from Thai Pan again & again, experiencing only the rare disappointment. For instance, I’ve found the lard na (not pictured)—wide rice noodles, more commonly transliterated as rad na, in a brown gravy—to be a bit overcooked & bland, & the som tum—Thailand’s classic green papaya salad—desultory to say the least.

But tod mun (fried whitefish cakes) are hot, fat, fresh & crunchy.

Conversely ,the spring rolls are cold, fat, fresh & punchy; I got a side of peanut sauce to supplement the usual sweet chili dipping sauce, & was pleased to find it thick with crushed nuts, not starchy.

Finally, the kitchen generally makes a mean stirfry; both the Mongolian with onion, scallions & crispy noodles & the pad phrik with peppers, onions, bamboo shoots, carrots, kaffir lime leaves & curry paste have left us sweating & swooning.

A long time ago, an old friend of mine whom my thoughts are always with & who remains my favorite living poet, Chelsey Minnis, wrote a poem that began with the line “This is the last time I write about the moon.”

That will probably be the most interesting thing I say in this blogpost, & the recommendation that you read her work will be the most satisfying recommendation I make.

Because how many times can I get delivery from some pan-Asian joint I know is going to be so-so to begin with, find it to be so-so indeed, & write a so-so review about it? We’ll see, I guess. For now, I’m saying no more times. Oh good, it’s 5 o’clock.

***

Now I have a glass of wine, & I’m going to try to pull this off in the sudden haze of melancholy. There don’t appear to be many pro reviews of John Holly’s Asian Bistro; the fact that Warren Byrne supposedly liked it 8 years ago means next to nothing to me. Then again, the fact that there aren’t many pro reviews means next to nothing to me; we all have our moments when we just need someone to feed us hassle-free in our own homes, & the majority of eateries that provide such door-to-door service are the ones whose so-so-ness is a given. So if no one else is going to bother, I might as well; while quality matters less than convenience in said moments, it’s still nice to know which dishes might taste a little better than which others.

This is the filling for the lettuce-wrapped chicken. The lettuce isn’t pictured, since I assume you know what lettuce looks like. I’d have taken a picture if it had been wilted or rusted or otherwise deficient, but it wasn’t.

It’s listed as hot & spicy on the menu; it’s neither hot nor spicy (not that I’m sure what the difference is). But it isn’t bland either, or worse, too sweet; it’s a standard brown sauce marked by a touch of sweet chili smothering ground chicken, peas, red peppers & onion.

Speaking of things I’m not sure about…well, I could go on forever, but I was definitely curious as to how much lobster could possibly be included in a $3 lobster spring roll. I’m still not sure. Somewhere between “not very much” & “a tad more than not very much. Or not.” Could be a krabsticky version of lobster, or a mixture of real lobster & krab. In any case it isn’t pure lobster meat.

Which isn’t, again, to say it’s bad; given a warm, crispy-crunchy shell shiny with just enough grease & brain-clearing hot mustard as foils for the mildly sweet whatever, how could it be?

Its clear superior, however, is the steamed roll with beef.

To be clear, while the roll as a whole is steamed, the strips of beef inside are nice & fried with chunks of egg, cabbage, whole green beans & onion. I could make a meal of a few of these. Granted, I could make that same meal at home, but so what? The point is it’s nice not to have to.

Holly’s Lamb, according to the menu, is “sliced top round lamb…stirfried with low-sodium oyster sauce & a pinch of black pepper & cumin seed.” I like salt. Lots of salt. When I was little I’d pour a mound onto my palm & lick it off. I drink pickle juice. Etc. But I was pleasantly surprised by this dish,

which isn’t salt-free, rest assured; the sauce is richly savory, & the chunks of meat, red onion, red pepper & snowpeas generous.

As for the sushi, even keeping in mind that I was not in the hands of a master itamae here but chefs of the pile-&-stuff-&-pile-some-more school of American maki, I still thought the rolls I ordered were too much. Granted, I ordered ‘em; but that’s the kind of sucker for umeboshi (pickled plum) & shiso leaf I am: the roll on the left is the Kimberly, filled with salmon, avocado & asparagus, topped with seared albacore, & supposedly the ume was in there somewhere too. The roll on the top right is the Osaka, filled with spicy tuna & avocado & topped with mackerel, egg, & shiso. (On the lower right is Japanese squash.)

I definitely didn’t see, nor did I taste, all of the listed ingredients, & the fact that I don’t know whether that’s because the combos were just too busy or some things were actually left off is the whole problem. As it was the rolls were coming apart a bit at the seams.

In sum: Not great, not bad, okay for weeknight delivery, like 100 other places I’ve covered.

As in still racked by operational kinks. Try Chaotic Bangkok, as in service that, though clearly well-meaning, is all over the place. Conversely, try Totally Tame Bangkok—because so far the kitchen isn’t taking any of the chances suggested by outward appearance, not to mention by the website’s claim to “authentic” “sophistication” from an international culinary team.

It’s a bummer, because I really want to like this place; here’s hoping the food will soon reflect the Northern Thai accents throughout both the vibrantly pretty space (note the traditional seating)

& the menu, which lists regional specialties that happen to be among my all-time favorite Thai dishes, including miang kham, Chiang Mai dip (apparently a variant on nam prik ong, containing chicken rather than the standard pork) & the fish custard known as haw moak (here called “Exotic Ocean”).

Unfortunately, listing them & actually offering them are 2 different things; if strike 1 was the 5-minute wait with 8 other people at the cramped entrance—not because there were no tables available but because the host was flitting about helplessly with a permanent strained smile on his face—then strike 2 was ordering the miang kham & nam prik ong only to hear they were out of both. At noon. Huh.

Putting aside our sweet but scattered server’s failure to bring plates & utensils until after a) our 1st course & b) we asked for them, I was beginning to see strike 3 coming: the food was made to suit American tastes, proving entirely mild &/or overly sweet rather than exhibiting the cross-palate balance for which Southeast Asian cookery is so renowned.

Granted, the appetizers we finally did get—money bags (toong tong) & curry puffs—were almost quite good.

In deep-fried rice-flour wrappers, the chicken, crab, corn & peanut stuffing of the former, served with sweet chili dipping sauce, wasn’t as distinctive as it sounded, but as a whole the little poppers were pleasant enough. The curry puffs, meanwhile, might have been a whole different matter if they’d been fresh; having obviously been sitting under heat lamps for a spell, the shells were leaden & stale-tasting, their contents indeterminate: supposedly vegetarian, it sure seemed to include ground pork to me. The fact that I couldn’t really tell was a bit unsettling. But the curried spicing was nice & the dipping sauce of, we believed, apple, red onion, cucumber, honey & vinegar intriguing. In short they coulda been contenders if somebody’d looked out for ‘em just a little bit.

The pattaya grouper, however, wasn’t even close,

steamed in a cloyingly fruity-sweet ”special sauce” & set atop a clump of pasty soba noodles with 2 slightly woody asparagus spears. At least the house rice, a mix of brown & wild, was all right.

My lunch date, Beth Partin, fared much better with her massaman curry (on the right),

the peanut & coconut milk gravy strong & rich, filled with potatoes, onions, carrots & chunks of beef; too bad the latter, according to her, was on the tough side (I only tasted the sauce).

It came with rice &, for a small supplemental fee, a bowl of the best dish we tried—a wild pumpkin soup (on the left) that, surprisingly, wasn’t sweet at all but curried & slightly tart.

Overall, though, the misses were more glaring than the hits were satisfying—something the folks at Wild Bangkok will have to remedy quick, not least because the prices they’re asking are substantially higher than most joints of its genre command—think 14 bucks for pad Thai. Until then, think too about going somewhere else, at least at the height of the lunch rush.

I think I’ve now tried every Thai takeout joint within a few miles of my southeast Denver hovel: Thai Basil. Spicy Basil. Spicy Thai. Thai Green Chile. Swing Thai. Jason’s Thai Bistro. Thai This. Thai That. Sucky Noodle. Pad Crud. For the most part they’re as interchangable as their names.

I’ve acknowledged that a) takeout is itself a crapshoot (so to speak) & b) there are a few local joints I’ve yet to hit that do get the love from writers I trust, e.g. Lori Midson, above all US Thai, Thai House, & Chada Thai. (You might also trawl Chowhound for recs like this from lotuseedpaste, who knows her stuff too.) But those are clearly the exceptions to a citywide rule. If I overstate the case, by all means, give me hell & tell me what I’m missing. Otherwise heed my warning & order in from the above, with the possible exception of Thai Basil, only if you’re really lonely & your sole human contact for the eve will be the 2 min. you spend chatting with the delivery guy at the door—who’s sure, to offer another apparent truism about Denver Thai, to be exceedingly gracious & kind. One could do worse in one’s relationships.

In all fairness, then, to the lovely gentleman who recently brought us dinner from Spicy Thai, I’ll admit up front that we only tried 4 dishes. But the fact that each was as ho-hum as the last means I won’t be trying any more, at least not any time soon.

The shumai were doughy & dull;

the lamb curry bland,

the drunken noodles utterly without finesse, too soupy & spiced way down.

Without a picture to remind me I’d have forgotten about the soggy but otherwise characterless seaweed salad entirely. The line between a good seaweed salad & a bad one is thin but distinct; I asked for examples on Chowhound & got some smart replies.

It all made a subsequent order from the aforementioned Thai Basil, mostly merely adequate, seem downright dazzling by comparison.

Above all, the crispy duck was even richer & tenderer than the 1st time we had it, & the portion for the price, $12.50, popped the eyes.

It came with surprisingly good peanut sauce, less thick & more vinegary than the majority. That may primarily be why I also liked mild red ”curry chicken in peanut sauce.” Sounded confusing, tasted mellow & creamy, indeed simply combining the two sauces in a way I’m not sure I’ve ever come across before, though a search suggests it’s common.

Should’ve known better than to order Szechuan eggplant rather than Thai eggplant from a Thai place; it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t spicy or sesame-tinged in the least. I’d also have preferred the ratio of eggplant to other veggies be higher, given that that’s what I ordered. Still, it was colorful & tangy & well textured.

Seared scallops in an almost brothy sweet chili sauce didn’t engage my tongue much, but the sheer number of critters for the price, the same as that of the duck, was once again impressive.

Bottom line: if you’re stuck at home in southeast Denver & a craving for Thai strikes, get over it. If you just can’t get over it, then call Thai Basil & keep your expectations modest.

Unless, that is, you’re one of the 28.8 folks who’ve given Spicy Thai two thumbs up on Urbanspoon, in which case go right ahead & order up a storm.

I’ve roasted the skin (hope it’s thick!) off poor Thai Green Chile; I’ve sprayed phrase-mace in Jason of Jason’s Thai Bistro’s face; I haven’t bothered wasting even an inch of cyberspace—& it’s infinite!—on Swing Thai or Spicy Basil. Yet looking at the menus of the likes of  Chada Thai, with its miang kum & haw moak, and reading the raves for Edgewater’s US Thai, I realize that it’s too soon to conclude from my experiences thus far that there’s no Thai around here to speak of except in snarky tones.

That’s especially true insofar as I’ve been insisting, by a series of associations, on ordering the stuff in. I tend (as I think most humans, with our serotonin levels & various biological drives, do) to associate carbs & fat with comfort. I tend (as the luckier among us humans do) to associate home, with its old sofas & filthy sweatshirts & sweethearts lounging around on & in them, with comfort too. Thus I tend, as I think a lot of lucky-gimme-gimme-yay Americans do, to associate the delivery of carb-heavy, fatty foods to my front door with comfort. And thus in turn, I think, do we tend to order in those dishes immigrant cooks have altered precisely to suit our inborn palates, as opposed to the more “authentic” (whatever that means, as usual) dishes we’re more willing to try when already out of our comfort zones anyway, i.e., seated in the restaurants, away from our couches. To basically quote what I wrote in this Chowhound thread I started to get to the bottom of precisely this here theory (which is already yielding interesting & insightful answers, God bless that site), “Takeout/delivery seems to center on Americanized versions of dishes, be it pizza, Chinese, or whatever.
For instance, when I think of eating Chinese in, I think of Woody Allen and Mariel Hemingway in bed digging with their chopsticks into moo choppy gumshoe or whatever in Manhattan…No one’s ordering, say, tripe and jellyfish. As for pizza, if I’m ordering it in, I’m not likely to be getting a pie topped with zucchini blossoms and fresh mozzarella.”

And as for Thai, the ultimate hot-sour-salty-sweet cuisine, if we’re ordering it in, we’re not likely to be calling up the joints that specialize in miang kum & haw moak; we’re going for noodles whose sauces are oozing with brown sugar, tamarind &, for fuck’s sake, ketchup.

Point being twofold: A, as an American I can’t ask to be catered to like everyone else & then complain when I’m catered to like everyone else. I can’t shit on, say, Thai Basil for loading everything I order with sugar & thickeners when sugar & thickeners are where it’s at in most of the stuff I order. And yet B, as an American, just because I can’t doesn’t mean I can’t. I’m an American! As no less a quintessential American poet than Whitman put it, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” True that.

In short, I still say Denver Thai take-out largely sucks until proven otherwise. As for Thai Basil specifically, about half of my fair sampling of dishes can be taken & shoved, to use another expressly American line:

hot & sour soup, actually sweet & starchy viscous liquid

drunken noodles, actually oil junkies

golden tofu, actually beige cushion stuffing

& crispy fish with black bean sauce, actually breaded whatever (for a while we thought it might be some funky duck; that’s how unfishlike it was) with

shiny chunky fructose glop.

But I guess if (duck-fish aside) it walks like junk food & talks like junk food, then it’s probably junk food. By contrast, the green curry with chicken, if neither particularly green nor chickeny, at least had a nice medium texture & a moderate kick;

ditto the more generously laden red curry with scallops.

Potstickers & spring rolls were potstickers & spring rolls, neither here nor there—which is a good thing; both are all about soothing texture, remarkable only (unless you’re in the rare presence of a dumpling master) in the negative, i.e. if the former are doughy or the latter loose. These weren’t, so okay then.

Both here & there, meanwhile, were the marinated crispy duck—rich & glistening & definitely *not* to be confused with the aforementioned crispy fish—

& the Indonesian chicken salad, not to be confused with…anything definitively from Indonesian cuisine or any another so far as I know (do tell if you know otherwise), but yum nonetheless with roast chicken, cashews, raisins, mixed greens & peanut sauce.

These latter appeased me just enough to keep me from throwing Thai iced tea into the harbor—Rocky Mountain spring, whatever—at least until I’ve made it over to Chada.

I don’t know if that’s as wholly fair as it is kinda funny, but
the point is this: just because you can’t compare Vietnamese
cuisine & Thai cuisine per se doesn’t mean you can’t mention
a prime Vietnamese joint & a middling Thai, er, bistro in the
same sentence. See, I just did.

And having happened to sample the repertoire of both
Dong Khanh Saigon Bowl (in the Far East Center at Federal
& Alameda) & Jason’s
Thai Bistro near DU on the same day, I couldn’t not be struck
by the culinary pride & generosity of spirit of the one in
light of the overall dumbed-down corners-cutting of the other.

My pal Larry (he’s the photographer whose stellar portfolio of
the pickles & pumelos & plucky or puckered faces of their
vendors in marketplaces around the world I’ve referenced
before) & I spent a hyperleisurely lunch the other day
picking over the pile of tidbits & morsels & fry candy
that is Dong Khanh’s all-of-$18 signature appetizer platter the
other day—

shrimp cakes & egg rolls & half a softshell crab on top,
grilled chicken & pork strips & cold rice noodles on
bottom, lettuce & basil & sliced cukes & shredded
carrots & daikon & peanuts, all for wrapping in rice
paper disks softened in warm water like so

(the tricks: be quick before they get sticky on you, & keep
the mix of fillings to a minimum sizewise so they’ll hold) to
form your own fat cigars of goodness graciousness, which you dip
in the classic Vietnamese sauce, sweetish nuoc cham (think duck sauce with
class), before chomping away.

We also split goi tom
thit & got this gorgeously crisp & kicky
concoction of cold sliced roast pork & plump shrimp, sprouts
& mint & sliced chilies & more basil & peanuts
drizzled in a dressing not unlike nuoc cham, but lighter &
more than a bit spicy.

Dim-lit styrofoam aside, how could the Director’s & my
take-out trash from Jason’s not pale in comparison to what
remained as fresh & vivid in my memory as it was on the
plate?

Mind you, I’m all for rifling through trash upon occasion—who
doesn’t get down with a gloppy gallon of sweet & sour pork or
fettuccine Alfredo or chile con queso now & then?—but, to
paraphrase Stephen King, who once said of his writing something
like, “Sure, it’s salami, but it’s good salami,” if I ask nicely
for soppressata you’d better not toss me Oscar Mayer.

And if I order crab—not krab, crab—& avocado salad, you’d
better not serve me a bunch of lettuce with a smattering of
shredded processed whitefish on top.

And if I order fried tofu, I want crunchy golden-brown chunks of
soybean curd, not marshmallows or cotton balls.

And if I order plain old steamed veggies with beef, chicken,
shrimp & scallops, I’d better not get plain old steamed
veggies with beef, chicken & shrimp. (No photo necessary, I
presume.)

To end on a positive note, though, I will give it up for the snap
pea–studded signature rolls with beef, unexpectedly stirfried
with onions until caramelized & juicy, accompanied by a
peanut sauce that actually was, as opposed to just melted peanut
butter.

Now that’s more like it. I mean, not like it—Dong Khanh—but adequate in &
of itself.

The Thai joint we ordered takeout from the other night lacks so thoroughly in character that it’s almost anti-fascinating: the only way it could ever possibly distinguish itself is by making an honest mockery of its own mediocrity, say by changing its moniker to Generic Thai Takeout Joint, which is what its former and current names, Wild Basil & Thai Green Chile respectively, translate as anyway—as, surely, will its future name, Sweet Hot Ginger Pepper Brasserie & Curry Hut or some such.

It’s a damn shame, because I could use me some fine drunken noodles from time to time, never mind the hard-to-find-in-the-heartland likes of haw moak, a curried fish (or chicken) mousse steamed in banana leaf I used to order back in Brookline at Khao Sarn:

Instead we were stuck with Thai eggplant without a hint of mint or basil or a trace of funky fish sauce but way more than its share of sugar. (Don’t let the green leaf  in the bottom left corner fool you, that’s probably just pastillage. In fact, the whole thing, in all its bland sweetness, could very well have been decorative confectionery.)

The pork with garlic sauce was initially more redolent with basil (as opposed, inexplicably, to garlic)—but ultimately no less coarse & sticky.

Ditto the Singapore rice noodles, although nice fat shrimp & goodly chunks of chicken bespoke a generosity that went a short way toward compensating for the dumbed-down sensibility,

as did a complimentary if weird order of wontons that smacked of nothing if not recycled sopaipillas, with the honey drained out & cream cheese poured in.

I confess I feel a touch guilty harshing on one of my stretch of South Broadway’s few ethnic eateries insofar as it appears, between the name change & the consistent lack of traffic foot or otherwise, to be struggling; I can’t help but picture some graying mom & pop alone behind the counter, chins propped on elbows, no longer focusing on the American dream as they dreamed it as youths by the palm-fringed Andaman seaside but staring silently out the window across the street onto the shambles of the construction site where the Gates factory used to stand.

Then again, if they’d just cook like Thais instead of like Thais cooking like Americans, they might find their little nothing-to-lose risk paying off big as business picked up.

Then again again, what do I know, especially about my fellow Americans’ tastes? I drink pickle juice, which, per none other than Dr. Seuss—secret Jekyll to McCarthy’s Hyde as the mind behind the para-Technicolor, loop-the-loop descent into fascist paranoia that we happened to be taking vicariously over dinner, the cult ’50s flick The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T*—is but the Lethean liquor of commie homos bent on world destruction in the form of musical education as they prance about trilling, “Dress me up in silk & spinach!”

Oh, Dr. Terwilliker the main piano-teaching commie homo villain,

if only you were real, & we could dine à deux on haw moak with pickle juice, seduced by the strains of Chopsticks as pounded out by 500 nubile boys-next-door-turned-pitch-perfect-slaves. Now that’s my American dream.

*Available at Netflix.