First Look: Khao Horm Thai Aims To Create Comfort Food and Comfort Aromas

Scent and aroma, perhaps more than any other sensory input, can hold strong connections to memory, evoking scenes and events from childhood both good and bad. The scent of your grandmother’s perfume, the smell of a freshly-mowed baseball field or a newly-opened 64-pack of Crayola crayons can be powerful triggers to nostalgic memories. But food aromas are probably the most powerful scent of all; their strong associations easily conjure up warm and happy recollections of days past.

Chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven, for example, can recall cold and cozy winter mornings from childhood, or the aroma of Sunday gravy slowly cooking on the stove might remind one of family dinners once held without a cellphone in sight. Comfort foods, it would seem, start as comfort aromas whose familiar and calming scents can echo happy memories from the past.
Khao horm, and variations thereof, is a pronunciation of Jasmine rice in Thai, which, to a new restaurant taking up residence in the former location of Ari District, represents and encapsulates the “smell and warmth of home cooking.” This new spot, Khao Horm Thai, has been open for about four months and hopes to capture the familiarity and comfort of a home-cooked family meal that the smell of fragrant rice invokes in many.
We began our meal with an order of Lao egg rolls and duck roti. The egg rolls come four to an order, filled with chicken, glass noodles, mushroom and potatoes and accompanied by some sweet and sour sauce with peanuts for dipping. Attractively served and fried in thin wrappers, they have a distinct taste that differs from typical spring rolls.
The duck roti is stuffed with slices of crispy and juicy duck along with green onions and cucumbers and served with their own version of duck sauce. The roti is rolled and perfectly cooked and sliced into four portions for easier eating. This was one of the better starters we’ve had in a while, a creative and delicious use of ingredients presented in an elegant manner.
Our first main was kra pao kai, a traditional Thai basil stir fry of minced chicken with brown sauce, onion, green pepper and basil, served with rice and a fried egg. We’re not really sure what the peppers were, but they were mild enough. This dish hit high marks for us after we’d recently been disappointed by it at another restaurant.
We finished with a bowl of crisp duck noodle soup, and this was probably the best thing we’ve eaten to date this year. A huge bowl full of egg noodles and a generous portion of sliced crispy duck in a wonderfully rich, flavorful broth with nuance and character and garnished with bean sprouts and cilantro. We couldn’t get enough of this soup and will be thinking about it for a long time. Highly recommended.

Khao Horm Thai's menu lists favorites like pad see ew, pad woon sen, pad kee mow, as well as something called “white pad Tha,i” which sounds intriguing, as well as the stir-fries and green, yellow and red curries one expects at Thai restaurants. Tom yum and tom kha soups also make an appearance, along with khao soi, a style of soup from Northern Thailand.

If good food and its corresponding aromas have any power at all, then we think that Khao Horm Thai has a good shot at creating future nostalgic food memories and should be successful. It only makes scents.

2525 Inwood Road, No. 123. Monday – Saturday, 11 a.m. – 9 p.m.; Sunday, noon – 9 p.m.