Local Thais

Two new restaurants bring Bangkok to your block

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

Tamarind House (617) 491-9940 1790 Mass Ave (Porter Square), Cambridge Open daily, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. AE, Disc, MC, Visa No liquor Sidewalk-level access No smoking Brown Rice (617) 247-5320 14A Westland Avenue (Symphony), Boston Open for lunch Mon-Sat, 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m., and for dinner Mon-Fri, 5-10 p.m., and Sat and Sun, 5-10:30 p.m. MC, Visa Beer and wine Access over a bump from sidewalk level; back room up several stairs; bathrooms down a flight of stairs No smoking

Want to feel needed? Here's a plan:

1) open a Thai restaurant near Porter Square; and

2) wait.

Tamarind House is a very unassuming restaurant, yet by about seven last Monday night -- maybe two weeks after the place had opened for business -- I showed up by myself, table for one, and was barely able to get a seat.

Tamarind inhabits a storefront that languished idle for a couple of years, a surprising eddy in the general current of Mass Ave prosperity. There was a sign in the window, RESTAURANT SPACE FOR SALE, and a room full of blond chairs and tables behind it. The sign is now gone, replaced by a striking red-and-yellow TAMARIND HOUSE placard, but the new owners haven't made a lot of changes beyond that. The blond chairs are still here, as is the beige tile floor. A divider runs down the middle of the room, now crowned with flowering plants; the plate-glass front windows are painted with a yellow stripe repeating the name of the restaurant, but still give everyone a clear view of the Mass Ave parade.

After a couple of meals at Tamarind House, it's clear that the crowd isn't there because of the food. This is not bad Thai food, but you wouldn't drive across town just to try it. The crowd is there because Cambridge, for all its vaunted diversity, is strangely undersupplied in Thai restaurants, and Tamarind House, depending how you draw your lines, is the only Thai menu between Boston and Inman Square. Clearly the twentysomethings in the area have been waiting for a chance to descend at 7:30 on a neighborhood storefront for sweetened iced tea and red curry beef.

Actually, they'd be smart to look past the red curry beef ($9.25), which is only fair to middling, and check out the submenu of Thai salads, listed as "Tamarind House Salads." Salads in Thai cooking are generally approached in a rather un-Western way -- for one thing, they are primarily meat. Your typical Thai salad tosses marinated and grilled sliced meat with some pungent veggies (sliced scallions, maybe mushrooms and red pepper), amps it up with lime and chili, and lays it over a bed of lettuce, but the lettuce is more for decoration than substance. In the yum nuer ($8.75), a tasty salad of medium-rare sirloin that makes a perfectly adequate dinner in itself, there's the interesting touch of crunchy fried rice particles sprinkled over the beef -- an unexpected and slightly exciting texture. Vegetarians will want to skip the salad menu and order som-tum ($6.50), a lively plate of shredded papaya and carrot.

I also enjoyed the todmun ($5.50), a quirky Thai appetizer of ground shrimp formed into spongelike patties, which you cut up and dip into a sweet chili sauce. These looked brown and a bit oily but opened up with some nice flavors.

Dishes with a little more pop appeal were less compelling. Crispy pad Thai ($8.25) -- a blond Afro of crunchy noodles -- was a little heavy on the Jheri Curl. One noodle dish was downright awful looking -- the pad woonsen ($7.50), a jiggly greenish-yellow dome of translucent noodles with bits of egg and vegetable matter. Nonplused, I dug my fork in anyway and was pleasantly surprised; it tasted better and fresher than it looked, and I ended up eating about half the dish.

Service seemed sharp and efficient, with servers rotating to take orders, fill water glasses, and bring food. There seems to be one major rush, from about 7 to 9 p.m. -- the joint is jumping at 7:30, as I said -- but come a little later and you can have the place to yourself. There is, unfortunately, no beer, but the Thai iced tea -- an orange flowery concoction sweetened with condensed milk -- does just fine in a pinch.

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There's something ironic about a new Thai restaurant opening at 14A Westland Avenue, in the East Fenway. The previous restaurant here was Cena, the hip no-red-meat bistro run by Tom Tenuta (whose next restaurant, coincidentally, is about to open down the street from Tamarind House). But prior to Cena, only a couple years ago, this space was . . . a Thai restaurant.

It's a strange space in some ways. The front room has an intimate and trendy feel, with a small bar and two booths that look out onto Westland Avenue. The real dining room, reached by walking past an open kitchen and up a few steps, is more expansive and more nondescript. As at Tamarind, the owners haven't done much to re-fit the place; gone are the neo-Roman touches of Cena's interior paint job, but it retains the parchment-lit air of a city bistro.

Like Tamarind, Brown Rice isn't snappy enough to be a destination restaurant, but it plays an important role in its student-heavy neighborhood. Unlike Tamarind, this place is one among many nearby Thai restaurants -- it fills its slot not by being rare, but by being cheap. Try this: $6 for red curry beef. Soup for $2.75. Pad Thai for $5.95. The portions are modest but adequate. This has got to be one of the least expensive new sit-down restaurants of the past five years. I went with a friend and we split two appetizers, two entrées, and dessert -- more than we needed to eat -- and the tab came to about $25, plus beer (which they do have).

We are not talking about high-end Thai food, but I didn't taste anything I didn't like. Pad Thai was serviceable, if a bit gummy (points for fresh bean sprouts on the side; deduction for no lime slice and one cottony-textured prawn). A dish of "Shang Hai" ($6.25) was a chow-fun-style plate of clear noodles (or "glass noodles") topped with ground pork and given a nice kick with dried chili flakes and scallions. An appetizer of spring rolls ($4.25 for six) was tidy and crisp. There are a few Japanese dishes on the short menu (shumai, gyoza, miso soup), and apparently a few crypto-Japanese ones: we ordered "Thai sticks" ($4.50) and got, essentially, tempura -- deep-fried strips of zucchini, red pepper, sweet potato, and so on, in a batter slightly darker than tempura but still quite light in texture.

Service one night had that painful new-restaurant friendliness, in which about eight people wish you good night at the end of your meal; another night it was swift and stayed in the background. At any rate, get there while these prices last.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.

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