Wonder Spice Café

A tiny Cambodian find in JP

by Robert Nadeau

DINING OUT

Wonder Spice Café 697 Centre Street, Jamaica Plain (617) 522-0200 Open Sun-Thurs, 1:30 a.m.-3 p.m. and 5-10 p.m.; Fri and Sat, 1:30 a.m.- 3 p.m. and 5-10:30 p.m. No credit cards Beer and wine No liquor Sidewalk-level access

The success of the Elephant Walk restaurants has, I think, somewhat intimidated other Cambodian restaurateurs. Or perhaps they simply have been riding on the better-known items on their Thai menus. Wonder Spice Café touts "Cambodian-Thai Cuisine" and looks like a miniature version of Boston's palatial Thai restaurants, but most of the dishes have Cambodian names. And some of them are good enough to attract customers from well beyond the neighborhood.

"Saiko Aing Kroeung" ($4.95), for example, is the most exquisite satay going, four skewers in the key of beef, marinated in one spice blend and dipped in a thin peanut-coconut curry that sends the diner to spice heaven. "Sa-ngao Mouan" ($2.95) is something like the clear Thai soup tom yam, but with even more lemongrass and galangal added to the broth, chicken instead of shrimp, and a wonderful topping of fresh scallions and anise-scented Asian basil.

Nor would you regret an order of "Loc Lac" ($11.95), a dandy stir-fry of steak, vegetables, and a lot of garlic served on a green salad. "Mango Curry de Legumes" ($9.25) is described as a "light curry sauce." By this they mean not too spicy, rather like the sweet masaman or yellow curries on a Thai menu. "Light" does not fully apply to the sauce, which is based on coconut milk. This kind of sweet vegetable curry is always popular, but here it's enhanced by chunks of ripe mango for a truly refreshing accent.

"Golden Harvest" ($4.50) was a very good appetizer, a little dish of vegetable tempura served with a sweet and fiery dip that in a Thai restaurant might be called squid sauce, as well as with the familiar soy-sesame tempura dip. Also in a Japanese or Korean mode was seaweed salad ($5.25), a beautiful dish of translucent green shreds on a bed of mesclun that caught the light and crunched between the teeth to release a flavor of sesame and salt. "Wonder Tofu" ($4.50) is cut into rectangles and fried with a little batter, and served with more of the squid sauce and soy dip.

A couple of dishes need only a higher frying temperature to get there. I had a somewhat greasy order of Khmer rolls ($4.25) at lunch. These were thicker than the superb rolls at Elephant Walk, and cooked in conventional egg-roll skins, which are thicker than the imported rice skins of the best rolls. Even so, they would have been quite good, with crunchy fillings of cabbage and black mushrooms, except for the extra grease. The squid sauce is well-employed here.

"Spicy Basil Fried Rice" ($8.95 with chicken, beef, or tofu; $9.95 with shrimp, scallops, or calamari) likewise had picked up a little too much grease. The Thai basil was lost in the mix, although the scallops we ordered were quite tasty and easy to pick out.

A better fried starch was "Mee Ka Tang (Pad See Ew)" ($8.95). The dish was rather Cantonese in style, with the wide noodles the Chinese call chow fun nicely wok-seared along with chicken (or you could choose beef) and Chinese broccoli in a dark sauce.

The white rice at Wonder Spice is real, aromatic Thai jasmine rice. The brown rice is medium grain and not so special.

Wonder Spice is a rather small storefront that nevertheless manages to cram in some fine sculptures and wood carvings. Perhaps the most exotic feature, though, is a tape of Christmas songs I lunched through in early May! Service is quite good, perhaps because the L-shaped room is too small for a table to get out of sight of a waiter.

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Sometimes I go to a restaurant like the Rainforest Café (in the Burlington Mall), and it seems like the end of this job. The Disneyfication of everything is happening faster than I can deconstruct it. The food -- beyond the beef, chicken, and seafood dishes you can find at every restaurant with a freezer -- is only vaguely tropical and no more related to a rain forest than to a coral reef, a savanna, or a desert. The waffle-cut French fries are sorta okay in a way that not only is unlinked to rain forests or cafés, but is also critic-proof. Whenever I begin to write down that a dish is "nondescript," I wonder why I am taking the note at all. The décor/atmosphere is barely animatronic elephants and gorillas, with a few strobe lights and some white noise representing a rainstorm. The servers wear park-ranger uniforms, as though the rain forest were safely under the administration of Smokey the Bear, and -- again as at Disney World -- the souvenir shop takes up almost as much space as the actual restaurant.

The experience peaked at the door, where a worker showed off a pair of gray parrots. It carried over somewhat to the gateway to the dining room, where we waited under a salt-water aquarium. But once we were seated, it was all plastic iguanas and "Mayan meatloaf." My companion Stephanie insisted on a dish called "chicken fried chicken" ($11.50), which she somehow recalled from a different chain of restaurants as very large and delicious. And it was comfort food, in a starch-grease-protein kind of way, featuring food that has transcended seasons: garlic mashed potatoes, boneless fried chicken, and pre-wilted salad. I guess Tarzan (in a waterfall) is sort of rain-forest-based, what with swinging on the vines. But zebras don't belong. Potstickers don't belong, and they wouldn't belong even if the shells weren't thick and hard. "Brave New World Pizza" doesn't belong.

Someone belongs who is more amused than exhausted by this phantasmagoria of the random exotic. I can't even tell you exactly to what the Rainforest Café is untrue.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at robtnadeau@aol.com.

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