Spice is strange in that the name evokes images of a steaming flotilla of battery-acid magic. Instead, you get the soft display of pretty vegetables, comely sauces and sculpted white rice pads that mostly soothe the palate instead of challenging it.
The interior has that bright, glossy, model-home-in-the-subdivision beauty to it, the kind where you keep scanning the room to locate the curtain hiding the Wizard. The walls, splashed in the kind of yellow one sees only on bath towels, hold rows of abstract paintings that seem wrought from computer ink jets instead of hand-guided brushes. The tiled floor is white. Brushed metal glamorizes the bar and the wait station. An arch marks the kitchen portal.
Spice's food is comfortable in a way that good ethnic food shouldn't be. Yet it's good anyway, or at least it's nicely displayed.
The starter sampler is a frenzy of appetizer scraps scattered haphazardly over a mound of chopped lettuce. Satay, juicy chicken on sticks and jaundiced with curry, is delicious. There is also a tempura regimen piled on: carrots, zucchini, broccoli, mushrooms and baby corn. Baby corn? That's a little weird, like finding a deep-fried sweet gherkin in your onion rings.
Pork dumplings, sheathed in supple wonton skins, were cold but tasty. Two rolls also came with the sampler: one fried and the other raw. The fried version was greasy (a lot of Dallas kitchens need to use hotter oil or maybe just switch to 40-weight), and it was packed with carrot, rice noodles and cabbage. The raw rolls were fat and tightly stuffed with carrot, bean sprouts and lettuce. It was like eating a hand salad.
Everything on the Spice menu is hustled off into corners: noodle corner, curries corner, salad corner, soup corner, etc. From the soup corner we sampled the wonton, which featured the same pork stuffed dumplings as the starter sampler, but they were hotter on account of the broth, which faintly tasted like the mass dissolution of dozens of bullion cubes. The surface floated strips of bok choy and scraps of scallion, all of them barely kissed by the hot broth.
Another quirky thing Spice does is name dishes after itself, like "Spice noodle" or "Spice fried rice," leaving the impression that you're about to sample a dish that feels like a ladle-full of live piranhas.
Spice Island, a stir-fried seafood medley, was riddled with crisp asparagus stalks, pea pods, carrots and baby corn in a "special spicy sauce" that was neither. It had rippled tubes of fishy calamari, soapy shrimp and sweet, firm scallops.
Spice fried rice was short of heat, too, but it was still delicious. The rice was fluffy and separate, the pieces of chicken were moist and tender, and the basil, scallions and bell peppers were crisp. Most important, the egg didn't look like baby spit-up. It all tasted well-seasoned and swell.
Glass noodle rice salad tasted this way also. This clean composition, with separate glass noodles stained into a reddish hue from a brisk lime, fish-sauce and red chili dressing, featured knots of juicy ground chicken, flecks of cilantro and pieces of bell pepper and onion.
The real showstopper at Spice is the whole fried snapper, which looks like a fertility-rite headdress from the Rain Forest Cafe. It's delivered to the table with its body swamped in halved baby corns, pieces of fried basil, red and green bell peppers and mushrooms. Underneath its adorned body and head (with a half-open mouth displaying an attractive set of needle-like teeth) is a reddish sauce brewed from oyster sauce, garlic and salt that comes off more sweet and unctuous than anything. The fish itself was creamy white and flaky, locked as it was in a deep-fried crust creating all manner of textural foiling, complementing and balancing, especially when those vegetables are thrown into the mix.
Dessert was good. Sweet rice with mango is a firm mattress of sticky rice drenched in coconut milk. A halved mango, sliced into sections, reclines in the milky, translucent goo.
Spice doesn't live up to its name (hell, it doesn't even have little chili peppers stacked in rows of two or three on the menu to indicate heat levels), but it still delivers mostly clean, well-arranged food that doesn't insult your palate. It's nice, not spice.
