Thai Pastry & Restaurant
4925 N. Broadway
773-784-5399
Thai, some Chinese
Main dishes from $5-$11
Monday to Thursday 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.
Noise level: Subdued; no TV
The name says it all at this Thai posting along the Asian restaurant strip near Argyle and Broadway. Three large display cases and coolers lie right inside the front entrance, filled with small cakes and pastries, ice creams, miniature fruits molded from sweet bean paste—Asian halvah—and iridescent molds of Jell-O-like agar-agar.
You might think that this was merely an Asian bakery but for the score of tables that fill a pleasant, if plain, large dining room. (Outside sidewalk seating is also available this time of year.)
The very extensive menu (there must be more than 100 items) hews a mostly Thai line, although many of the stir-fry preparations, especially the lunch specials, are more traditionally Chinese.
By and large, Thai Pastry & Restaurant delivers on well-prepared, flavorful food, and at prices that are more than reasonable for the quantity.
Starters include a raft of Thai soups, such as the standard, but well executed, tom kha kai ($4.95; $6.95 large), tender chicken slivers floating in a spicy broth sweetened with coconut milk. For a switch, try kang-jued tao hu ($4.95; $6.95), hundreds of bits of ground pork, interspersed with tofu chunks, in a deeply flavored broth.
Spring rolls ($3.95) are notable for the thick vein of cucumber running through their middles and the unusually thick rice paper holding everything together. The sauce for the chicken satay ($4.95) is less peanut-y than most others and the satay themselves come nicely grilled, if a bit overdone—the perennial problem with satay. But the kuchai ($3.95), four steamed dumplings filled with chives and bitter greens, are a wonder. This is the way to eat your vegetables.
A whole class of foods falls under the Thai and Laotian category of 'salads,' a range of eats much more extensive than our notion of dressed greens.
Thai Pastry's Thai beef salad ($6.95) mixes strips of just-done beef, red onion, cilantro leaves and greens, all doused with Thai fish sauce and lime juice, for a substantial, though refreshing, dish. 'Tiger beef' ($6.95) brings similarly sliced strips of beef, slightly sweetened and piled off to the side of a juicy, citrusy dipping sauce.
And larb ($5.95)—finely ground, seasoned and cooked pork, chicken or beef—arrives with its accompaniment of sticky rice (on one visit, a bit too sticky ...), used to pick up the larb for small mouthfuls.
Of course, the menu also lists a long lineup of noodle dishes, including a nice turn—extra crunch, super moist—on pad Thai ($5.75). The pad sei euw ($5.75) brings a mass of thick rice noodles, surprisingly al dente, with no short shrift of either broccoli, meat or basil leaves.
And what's a Thai restaurant without its curries? Try the green curry ($7.25) for that inimitable blend of sweet and heat, flavoring shrimp and tofu (or any choice of meat), chock full also of Thai eggplant, bamboo and mushrooms. The curries here are actually rather mild, as Thai restaurant cooking goes, so fear not the venture.
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