The Mango Lassie

I ate a lot of Thai food while I was in college at Wesleyan University. Two of the more popular restaurants in Middletown, Connecticut were Thai spots, and neither was particularly remarkable. My grandmother, Trader Joanna, has long frequented another fairly run-of-the-mill Thai place near her house in Portland, and I’ve joined her there for dinner many a time. These restaurants are all fine, but they serve the same dishes as the majority of Thai restaurants in this country. Pad Thai, green curry and satay chicken have become ubiquitous and unexciting.

There are other restaurants, like Portland’s Sweet Basil Thai, that use fresher ingredients and more varied preparations to move beyond the greasy, ho-hum standards. But this restaurant still aims toward the American palate by dressing up and improving familiar dishes.

Chicago’s Spoon Thai is in Lincoln Square, an area where many Thai people live and own businesses. The restaurant has a menu filled with all the standard dishes, but it also has a special Thai menu that contains more authentic dishes. These seem exotic to American diners, but they are the items the restaurant’s Thai customers order. In fact, the menu was only printed in Thai until a foodie blogger translated it into English for the rest of us.

Mango Mama, Empanada Boy and I stopped in at Spoon to sample some of these dishes. Armed with my printed copy of the menu, I had already sought recommendations from other bloggers on dishes to order. We started with the delicious banana blossom salad (pictured above), made with strips of banana blossoms, poached chicken, shrimp, coconut milk and chile jam. This thin, sour curry had large chunks of tender Mudfish floating in it, along with onions green, beans and coconut. It was deeply flavorful with an almost fermented pungency to it, and it was very spicy, a sure sign that the dish was not altered for the bland Midwest palate.

We also tried two meat dishes. The first was a Thai-style fried chicken with sweet tamarind dipping sauce. The meat was nicely browned and crusty, but Mango Mama thought it was too hard to enjoy it because there wasn’t much of it on each piece of bone. That was not the case with the grilled Issan-style pork and rice sausages, which came topped with chile, ginger and peanuts. These had a similar fermented pungency to what I noticed in the soup. Each piece varied in texture and composition because some parts of the sausage had more meat and some had more rice, making for uneven, but interesting, cooking results.

At the insistence of Empanada Boy, we finished the meal with some banana sticky rice. The little patties of sweet rice came wrapped in a banana leaf. In addition to banana, each was also speckled with fermented black beans. This is a good example of the wonderful Thai tradition of sweet and savory dessert combinations.

These dishes were interesting, complex, and in most cases, unlike anything I had ever tried before. Empanada Boy and I will surely be back soon to sample dishes like dried “jerky” beef and catfish, coconut milk “custard” and “sweet liver” salad.

Spoon Thai
4806 N. Western Ave.
Chicago, IL 60625
773.769.1173