Thai food in Dallas is typically lumbering and uninteresting. The sauces are flabby, the textures tired, the flavors muddled. In this city, Thai cuisine lacks searingly distinct flavors or exotic subtlety.
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(972) 720-8424
Open for lunch Monday-Friday 11 a.m.-3 p.m.
open for dinner Sunday-Thursday 5-10 p.m., Friday & Saturday 5-11 p.m.
$-$$
4930 Belt Line Road, Suite 190, Addison
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Tucked amid Addison's swath of strip malls, Thai Orchid is one of the precious few Thai restaurants that skirts these annoyances and emerges with the necessary agility and style, raising it well above adequacy.
Here, only the fried spring rolls (each lunch special comes with soup or salad and a spring roll) with a crisp exterior and a moist vegetable core showed fatigue, with off flavors indicating old, perhaps rancid oil. But everything else rippled with grace. The lunch salad, with a slightly sweet, brisk dressing flecked with crushed peanut debris, was fresh and supple. Coconut-milk soup, tinged with an orange slick of chili oil, was smooth and well balanced.
Pad Thai ($8.95 dinner, $6.95 lunch) was distinct and limber, not gummy and addled. Its moist, smooth textures were blunted, ever so slightly, only by a lack of garlic or chili assertiveness, and the peanut fragments were a bit scarce.
Panang curry (choice of beef, chicken, or pork, $10.95 dinner, $8.95 lunch) was a simple puddle of coconut milk bursting with complex aromas. Ordered with pork, the meat was firm, chewy, and juicy. The flood was pocked with crisp bell peppers, bay leaves, and bright, wrinkled peas.
This timbre resonated through to dinner. Stuffed crab legs ($7.50) -- actually claws crammed with shrimp, sweet diced crab meat, and herbs -- were overlaid with a moist but crisp layer of breading.
Virile slices of galangal (a ginger-like root) punched tom kha gai ($3.95), a coconut milk-based soup, with stimulating herbal gusts. They rounded the searing -- but not painfully molten -- broth with a little soul, while chewy mushrooms, blanched tomato wedges, and tender, moist chicken breast meat furnished the pith in this smooth, slightly sweet soup.
This attention to detail and freshness carry through to the veggie plates. Spinach delight ($6.95), fresh spinach stir-fried with garlic and oyster sauce, was a heap of supple, tender spinach leaves laced with chewy mushrooms and a clean, savory sauce.
But perhaps the best dish tried was Thai Orchid duck ($16.95). Anchored with pieces of tender, juicy, boneless waterfowl, the dish is blanketed with delicately crisp fried basil leaves that lend an air of piquancy to the mix of sautéed bell pepper, onion, and cashews drenched in a Thai basil sauce.
All this is served in a clean, roomy, though relatively nondescript dining room washed in purple and mustard brown. It kind of looks like a model townhouse in one of those developments spreading like kudzu in Plano. But then again, when the food is this good, showy decor would only prove a distraction.
