Review: At Charm Thai Cuisine, the deep-fried specials were tops

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Charm Thai Cuisine
121 Preston St., 613-421-1777, charmthaicuisine.ca
Open: Tuesday, Wednesday 5 to 8:30 p.m., Thursday to Saturday 5 to 9 p.m., Sunday 4 to 9 p.m., closed Monday
Prices: shareable dishes up to $18.95
Access: steps to front door

If you’ve read enough of my reviews of Thai restaurants, you’ll have seen a reoccurring theme. I get most excited when these eateries offer specialties beyond the usual choose-your-protein curries and stir-fries seen on all of Ottawa’s Thai menus for the last four decades, since the first purveyors of that spellbinding Southeast Asian cuisine set up shop here.

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Call me blasé. As smitten as I am by Thai flavours and culinary classics, I crave novelty too.

So my heart beat a little faster when I recently saw that Charm Thai Cuisine on Preston Street had a special menu, as well as a regular menu. Now, upon closer inspection, the key adjective on at least five of 11 specials was either “crispy” or “deep-fried.”

“Canadians love deep-fried,” Shane Kanhakanchana, who both cooks and serves at Charm Thai, told me. Busted!

Bad news for those who prioritize healthy eating: Our favourites at one Charm Thai dinner were two crispy, deep-fried items, one from the special menu and the other from the regular one.

I’ve always loved the stir-fry of chicken, basil and chilies called gai pad kra pow in Thailand and on some menus. It’s available at Charm Thai too, but the special-menu rendition, called kra pow gai tod ($18.95), which features battered, fried and then stir-fried chicken morsels in an accessible but compelling sauce, is the one to order if you like food with toothsome crunch.

(Oh — who needs Duolingo, when you can infer from the above two dishes that “pad” means “stir-fried” in Thai, while “tod” means “fried” or “deep-fried?”)

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Meanwhile, the regular menu offers not just som tom Thai, the famous shredded papaya salad, and som tom Lao, its even spicier, funkier cousin (both $16.95), but also som tom tod ($18.95), in which the papaya comes in deep-fried clusters. Bonus marks for taste and texture, I say. (But, if mouth-searing heat is your jam, pick the som tom Lao.)

We tried two of six appetizers here, satay chicken with peanut sauce ($10.95) and the less-seen-in-Ottawa gai yang ($14.95), another grilled chicken preparation with its own complex, funky sauce. I preferred the more generous portion of chicken from the former and the more interesting sauce from the latter.

We tried just two soups here, namely meal-sized versions priced at $16.95 of tom yum, the hot and sour soup, found on the special menu and khao soi, the yellow-curry soup perked by sour mustard greens. Both were bulked up with plenty of rice noodles. But I think the latter had more substance and meatiness going for it.

I’ve wanted to try the special menu’s boat noodle soup ($16.95), a pho-like staple in Bangkok. But Charm Thai, which opened nearly a year ago, wasn’t serving boat noodle soup on the two times I asked for it. Coincidentally, it was the now-closed Nana Thai, which used to occupy the Preston Street address that Charm Thai calls home, that introduced me to boat noodle soup.

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Curries here were deftly made and tasty, although I slightly preferred the ones with chicken over the ones with beef, which had been thinly sliced and wasn’t so flavourful.

I always look forward to larb, the chopped-meat salad with its roots in Northern Thailand, and Charm Thai’s chicken larb ($17.95) balanced its sourness, heat and herbal notes nicely. The seafood salad ($18.95) was similarly bracing and pleasing, and its squid and shrimp had been treated with respect in the kitchen.

Noodles and rice dishes all did the trick for us. I’m team pad kee mow ($17.95) instead of team pad Thai, and at Charm Thai the spicy, garlicky, earthy, wide rice noodles pleased us with their punchiness. Mama pad ($16.95), was a homey but well-made stir-fry of instant egg noodles. Best of all, khaw pad sapparot ($19.95) was a grand fried rice, studded with chicken, raisins, cashew nuts and pineapple, which makes more sense here than it does on pizza.

The dining rooms here are small but boldly wrapped in bright yellow, graffiti-inspired murals. There’s also a small patio out front.

The restaurant didn’t have desserts or alcoholic drinks. But Kanhakanchana several times kindly brought us some on-the-house ice teas flavoured, we thought, with either pandanus or tamarind.

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Kanhakanchana told me Charm Thai is connected to food businesses in Bangkok and that it’s basically serving real Thai flavours, but with heat levels dialed down. It’s been decades since I’ve eaten in Bangkok, so I can only say that the complexities of flavours at Charm Thai were appealing, and the kitchen can ramp up the heat if so directed.

What I’m waiting for, though, is Charm Thai to leverage its Bangkok connections to offer items that are new to Ottawa, and which do Thailand proud. Let’s cross our fingers that the special menu here will be revised and enlarged.

phum@postmedia.com

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