Bangkok Blue

A Thai restaurant that serves fine (sometimes even thrilling) food

651 Boylston Street, (Boston); 266-1010
Open Mon -Thurs, 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Fri, 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.
Sat, noon to 11 p.m.; Sun, noon to 10 p.m.
AE, DC, Di, MC, Visa
Full bar
Up a threshold bump from sidewalk level

by Robert Nadeau

A sign in the window proclaims this to be Boston magazine's "Best of Boston" Thai restaurant for 1996. Well, not quite. This is a very good Thai restaurant, and I bet it's about as good this year as last year -- but this award illustrates the principle that there are no best restaurants, only best dishes.

You should certainly try anything that's listed on a small square of paper and clipped to your menu. From such addenda we ordered "golden triangles" ($4.95), eight petite fried triangular eggroll skins stuffed with a genuinely hot curry filling. Another special was "Siamese shu mai" ($5.95), not so different from the Cantonese dim sum of the same name: exquisitely fresh pasta barrels encasing a lean-meat filling.

The typical appetizers were good, but not so outstanding. Chefs who do angel wings ($4.95) always impress me with their trick of boning and stuffing the two-bone section of a chicken wing, but here the filling was simply a dull forcemeat of chicken. Better were the "dumplings" ($4.95), basically thin-skinned Peking ravioli with an excellent soy-ginger dip. Better yet was the chicken satay ($5.95), with a fine curry marinade, but I prefer more spice in both the peanut dip and the salsa-like dip that come alongside.

Liang soup ($3) is a hot, thin, clear soup with some prettily cut vegetables tossed in. The broth has strong aromas of galangal, citrus leaf, and basil, but no real body, so it is more like spicy tea (or dishwater) than what we'd call soup. The coconut-shrimp soup ($3) is relatively thin, but I've found this to be a good quality in a coconut soup.

Several of the better main dishes we tried featured fresh-tasting coconut milk, but the curries were not as distinctive as we might have wished. I think one problem is a general fear of over-spicing for non-Thai customers. (But that's why the menu has those little pepper icons, which here equal about one spice level lower than they might elsewhere around Boston.) My favorite coconut curry was rendang chicken ($10.95), an Indonesian dish that ought to be a little simpler than the Thai curries, cooked until all the sauce is absorbed, according to the cookbooks of Sri Owen. What is served at Bangkok Blue is soupier, more like what Owen calls a "kalio," but it was deliciously sweet and spiced something like the sweet masaman curries of Thailand.

Choo chee fisherman ($13.95) was a splendid assortment of seafood in a red curry sauce. I was especially impressed with the quality of the green New Zealand mussels in the mix, but the chunks of fried whitefish, the large shrimps, the scale-cut squid, and the very fresh-tasting scallops were all first-rate. However, a choo chee dish should have less coconut milk and more of the aromatic and spicy flavors of red curry paste, lemongrass, and basil leaves than this one did.

Sriracha delight ($12.95) was a similar mélange. Its sauce should have been less spicy than the choo chee, and more dependent on ginger, but here it was simply thinner. Again, good eating, but not a "best" dish. Emerald curry beef ($8.95) was also found lacking: not enough of the fiery and very different green-curry paste. Plus, the dish was dominated by the flavor of coconut milk.

Since the basic ingredients were so good, "Siamese twins" ($10.95) rose above our expectations for the dish, which is sweet-and-sour shrimp twinned with chicken. Crispy duck ($13.95) was simply sliced into pieces and deep-fried until parts of it became as crunchy as one of George Bush's favorite pork-rind snacks. It was served on fried rice-vermicelli noodles, like the Northern Thai dish called mee krob.

Vegetable pad Thai ($6.50) wasn't especially large or tasty. Nor was our rice ($1), which lacked the earthy, flowery aroma of Thai jasmine rice. Also, the shorter grains were stuck together, more like Chinese rice.

Bangkok Blue has ginger and coconut ice creams ($2.50), both with vanilla bases and bits of the other flavors. The restaurant also offers one cool new dessert, "Thai custard" ($2.50), which takes the familiar Southeast Asian dessert flavors of coconut milk, custard, and yellow beans, and whirls them together into something not unlike a bread pudding.

So now we have something thrilling in every course: the shu mai, the golden triangles, the chicken rendang, the seafood in the choo chee fisherman, the homemade Thai custard. But not everything is at that "best" standard. I certainly didn't eat in every Thai restaurant last year (and neither did Boston magazine's staff), but over time I've seen much of the Thai menu done better elsewhere: the real jasmine rice at Singha House, the pad Thai at Rama Thai, the choo chee sauce at Amarin, the green curry at Siam Cuisine, the red curry at Swasdee, the stuffed chicken wings at Montien, and so on. Boston may simply have too many very good Thai restaurants to have a "best" Thai restaurant right now.

None of this is to diminish the fine dinner I had at Bangkok Blue. But it does reinforce that principle about great dishes, not great restaurants. It's a nice room with nice service. But, again, the décor at Siam Cuisine and Amarin is more beautiful. Service was very friendly and very good -- above even the high average for Thai restaurants, but not unprecedented.

Bangkok Blue does stand out for general excellence in an area of downtown that is especially thick with Thai restaurants. I would rate it best of the six or so within walking distance of Boston magazine's offices at Horticultural Hall.

Another outstanding thing about Bangkok Blue is that it is still something of an orphan on its block (Boylston Street opposite the Public Library), and thus isn't nearly as crowded as it should be. A very good Thai restaurant where you can often walk right in -- no, don't expect that to work the same week you read this in the Phoenix -- can be the best restaurant in the history of the universe to a hungry group assembled for an informal dinner downtown.

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If you're reading this paper on Thursday, May 8, you've still got time to head downtown for tonight's Taste of the Nation benefit, where the price of a nice night out ($50) will let you spend three hours grazing at tables set up by more than 50 local chefs, as well as a host of wineries and breweries. The restaurants represented run the gamut from funky to fancy (but mostly fancy): Maison Robert, the Elephant Walk, Olives, Bob the Chef's. One hundred percent of ticket revenue goes to the national hunger-relief organization Share Our Strength, which distributes money to a number of local groups that fight hunger. The benefit runs from 6:30 to 10 p.m. at the Black Falcon Cruise Terminal, which is located at One Black Falcon Avenue, off Summer Street, in the Marine Industrial Park. (A courtesy van will ferry guests from South Station.) Tickets are available at the door. Call 576-5932 for more information.