The food seemed to sing more vividly in situ. Perhaps it would have tasted as good transported to my house - I have sworn for years that Thai food is particularly takeout friendly - but after my dine-in lunch, I wouldn’t put money on it. Its warmly spiced curry broth was swirled with coconut cream and lit from within by makrut lime leaf and its unmistakable perfume. The chef’s Panang curry with pork opened another window in my head. That’s the kind of story I craved, without realizing it, all those months when takeout sustained me. Benchawan Painter says the savory pancakes were her most-loved snack as a child, when a cart peddling them would come by her house every day. This is a dish you see only rarely, if at all, in American Thai restaurants. Eaten hot from the griddle, though, the pancake cubes had an interior tenderness that had vanished during transport, and the pan-fried margins fairly popped. I had admired this unusual street snack consumed at room temperature in my kitchen, noting the “toasty edges” and “captivating elastic quality.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. It hit me all over again when I bit into one of Benchawan Painter’s garlic-chive pancakes, square-cut marvels of soft, springy rice flour shot through with vibrant deep-green allium. But it couldn’t compare with eating a dish freshly prepared and rushed out to the table, in full possession of its volatile oils, its perfume, its flavors and heat levels leaping every which way. Those noodles were so alive - and I felt so alive tasting them - that it hit me: All that takeout I had consumed over the past year was fine and dandy, restorative even. The dish was pretty in a way this hangover staple often isn’t, too: bright little cartwheels of gold and red and orange and green chiles tumbled through the noodle-and-chicken mesh, glowing against the basil-leaf green and the azure ceramic glaze of the plate. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the Painters grow their own, from seed they got from Thailand. Everything looked so trim, so personal: the crisp white wooden chairs pulled up to the four-seater bar the teal- and rose-painted walls the modest flower bunches and stoppered water bottles shining on each table.Īnd that Thai basil aroma floating up from a plate of Drunken Noodles that jump-started my senses.Īs I forked up the flat strands of rice pasta and sautéed chicken, the herb’s characteristic licorice flavor bloomed so darkly and alluringly it took me aback. I felt a little giddy just sitting in the Painters’ neat, cheerful dining room, facing a tall, glassed-in cupboard housing an array of handsome serving pieces and glassware. I’d wonder if they’d do enough takeaway business to last through the worst of the pandemic. I’d catch a glimpse of co-owner Graham Painter or his wife, chef Benchawan Painter. When I got to feeling sorry for myself, I’d go online to order some pad Thai or sticky rice and mango, then drive through the restaurant’s service window. In the here and now, I had longed to see the inside of Street to Kitchen, the scrappy little East End Thai joint that fed me on a to-go basis during the long year of my self-isolation. It airlifted me back through the decades to a Bangkok night market where I’d picked up plastic bagfuls of stir-fried noodles, prizes on a food run with a Thai friend I was visiting. The sharp, herbal scent of Thai basil filled my nostrils as I sat, at long last, in the vest-pocket dining room at Street to Kitchen. Mango and sticky rice dessert at Street to Kitchen, a Thai restaurant at 6501 Harrisburg in Houston's East End.
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