Good food, good prices have My Thai hopping

By Elizabeth Large | Sun restaurant critic

October 21, 2007

I didn't give My Thai, Mount Vernon's new Thai restaurant, much chance to survive until I ate there.

Basement restaurants by their nature don't have much curb appeal. Add to that the competition: Thairish in the same block (true, it's mostly carry out), Thai Landing -- almost a Baltimore institution -- farther north on Charles, and Ban Thai just to its south.

But on a weeknight just a couple of months after opening, the place was rocking. Most of the tables in two of the three dining rooms were taken, as well as the high tops in the bar. The new owners have made cosmetic changes: The exposed brick walls have been freshly whitewashed, the floor is now tile, and the place looks more like a cheerful American bistro than a traditional Asian restaurant. It also sounds more like a bistro. When happy customers are imbibing a few brewskis and competing with the soft rock in the background, this can get to be one noisy place.

Or in today's lingo, one high-energy restaurant. Combine that with decent Thai food at very reasonable prices, a list of funky drink specialties (Mai Thai is, of course, the signature drink), and a serious sushi bar, and -- well -- we have a winner, folks. Our waiter told us that on the weekend the line waiting for tables goes out the door.

It's not that the food is totally beside the point. It's not. The kitchen specializes in bright, fresh combinations with plenty of flavor and heat if you want it. The menu is large, with the usual curries, stir fries and noodle dishes, plus seven house specialties. Just about everything we tried succeeded to some degree, although the sweet dishes were too sweet for me. So, for instance, gai yang chicken, which starts with a small fryer cut and is opened out so it can be grilled flat, had a spicy barbecue sauce that could have been used for dessert. But the chicken itself was perfectly cooked, and the fire helped combat the sweetness. (Or maybe vice versa, depending on how you feel about highly seasoned food.)

A whole rockfish, battered and fried, was arranged prettily on the plate with a blanket of peppers and onions. This sauce was only faintly sweet, and a better balance with the aromatic spices of the rest of the dish. It was subtle enough to highlight the flaky white fish, although subtle isn't an adjective I'd use too often in describing My Thai's food.

Thai salads are almost light meals in themselves, and involve plenty of heat and intriguing combinations like green papaya, string beans and peanuts. We tried a fairly substantial salad of warm cellophane noodles, with chicken, shrimp, peanuts and accents of peanuts and lime.

For a less-substantial first course, My Thai's summer roll is a cooling winner, with fat shrimp, lots of fresh vegetables in a rice paper wrapping with peanut sauce, and no peppers at all.

My favorite dish was a green curry with eggplant, beef and bamboo shoots. It didn't have the showiness of our other choices and the beef wasn't the most tender, but the layered flavors of basil and curry spices stood out even as the heat built.

The Shrimp Special My Thai was an excellent counterpoint to our other dishes. It wouldn't have occurred to me to order it, but I'm glad someone at the table did. If there's a weird Thai equivalent of shrimp stuffed with crab imperial, this is it, although the crab isn't lump. The shrimp were topped with ground pork, crab meat and egg. Maybe I was just overspiced from what else we were eating, but it worked for me.

My Thai's food is so reasonably priced that my tendency is to overlook what wasn't perfect. The mango with the mango and sticky rice dessert, for instance, was brownish rather than gold, although it tasted OK. And I can't take food garnished with canned pineapple chunks, cherry tomato halves and carrot slices as seriously as I should.

More important for me, and for anyone who takes comfort seriously, the tables are too small for four people who are sharing food. To make matters worse, a couple of our dishes came on huge square plates,which we had to balance precariously on one corner as we passed them around and helped ourselves. There simply wasn't room for what we had ordered.

As of my visit, My Thai didn't have the staff to handle the crowds. The servers couldn't be nicer, but they are seriously overworked. This meant long waits for anyone to clear our table or bring a dessert menu or ring up the bill. The kitchen, too, was backed up, so we waited a long time for our food.

I was of two minds about this. On the one hand, I wasn't happy about spending so much of the evening in a crowded, noisy restaurant. On the other, it's nice to see a downtown restaurant doing as well as My Thai seems to be in the first couple of months of its existence.

elizabeth.large@baltsun.com