Usually when readers call, it's to tell me about a dreadful dining experience they want me to do something about. (Not that there's anything I can do.) But the new Ten-O-Six is unique. It's the first restaurant that not one but several readers have felt passionate enough about to call and recommend in its first month of operation.
If the name sounds familiar, that's because Ten-O-Six was a jazzy little Federal Hill noodle shop until Thomas Chungsa-koon took it over at the beginning of this year. Before that Chungsakoon had worked as executive chef at Suburban Country Club. His wife, Penny, was his sous chef. When they took over Ten-O-Six, they renovated the dining room and tiny open kitchen and reopened the noodle shop as a fine-dining restaurant.
But it's a quirky fine-dining restaurant. The setting is more comfy-cozy than uptown-chic, with flowery print tablecloths, soft music and one pink rose on each table. Prices are surprisingly moderate.
If your favorite neighborhood restaurant suddenly started serving planked salmon and rack of lamb with a zinfandel sauce, but didn't charge an arm and a leg -- well, that's what Ten-O-Six feels like.
Chungsakoon bills his food as New American cuisine, but he's added dishes -- particularly appetizers -- from his native Thailand. You can start, for instance, with what I'd like to nominate as the best spring roll ever created.
This crisp-shelled delight is filled with snowy lump crab meat and shiitake mushrooms and served on a pool of "spicy Mandarin orange syrup" (OK, high-class duck sauce) edged with black sesame seeds. It's garnished within an inch of its life.
The Thai appetizer tod mon, fried fish patties, is made with minced lobster at Ten-O-Six. Not much of the lobster flavor came through, but they were prettily arranged on a cucumber sauce and decorated with macadamia nuts, and sported a whole piece of lobster claw meat for garnish.
American starters are done equally well. Clams casino were fat and bathed in seasoned butter with crisp curls of bacon on top. Smoked salmon was draped on savory dill-leek waffles and garnished with fresh horseradish, chopped onion and capers.
Ten-O-Six's entrees are rather more elaborate than you might want for a casual dinner in your neighborhood restaurant. From among the three Thai and eight American selections, you could have, for instance, a "Beef Napoleon" created from a handsome filet mignon stacked with shrimp and lump crab meat. It's gilded with hollandaise, which would be a fabulous combination except that this night, at any rate, it was a bit too salty.
Along the same lines, a beautifully fresh rockfish fillet was encrusted with pecans, baked, topped with fat lumps of crab meat and glazed with a faintly sweet orange beurre blanc. It worked better than I thought it might, but it was still a lot to do to a rockfish.
Entrees come with a handsome green salad with various house-made dressings and beautiful vegetables -- slim stalks of asparagus, deep-green baby spinach, tender florets of broccoli. The rockfish also arrived with swirls of pureed sweet potato. Almost everything was also garnished with crisp fried onions.
We had two of the Thai entrees. Tender slices of pork loin were bathed in a bit of zingy sauce. Sticky rice and a refreshing slaw of crisp slivers of green papaya came with them.
A half duck was fragrant with a sauce of red wine, tomato, garlic and cilantro; its accompaniments were jasmine rice, broccoli and haricots verts.
After dinner you can have any hot drink you want as long as it's hazelnut-flavored coffee (either regular or decaf). Desserts are made in house and are startlingly decorative, surrounded with creme anglaise, raspberry coulis, fat blackberries and sliced strawberries.
You might not be surprised to learn that Ten-O-Six has a quivery creme brulee or a smooth Key lime tart or an individual apple crumb pie, but I don't know of another place around here that produces baked Alaska on demand, with cake, strawberry ice cream and warm, delicately browned meringue.
TEN-0-SIX
Food: ***
Service: ** 1/2
Atmosphere: ** 1/2
Where: 1006 Light St.
Hours: Open every day for dinner
Prices: Appetizers: $5-$7; main courses: $11-$20
Call: 410-528-2146
Rating system: Outstanding: ****; Good: ***; Fair or uneven: **; Poor: *
Pub Date: 03/21/99