Amazing Thai Restaurant, Nanaimo
486A Franklyn Street
250-754-7818
(I wrote this article a few years ago for a city magazine:)
I could never easily articulate my reasons, but I have always considered Amazing Thai's elephant motif to be strangely ... cute. I always thought the elephant was a circus performer or something, referred to by introduction as "The Amazing Thai". I felt a childish association with this cartoon pachyderm. But this is not a mass-produced Disney-fast-food cartoon. I imagined I liked the place, and finally decided to check it out with a friend last week.
I was disappointed to learn that the elephant is not a circus performer and that the restaurant's name actually refers to the fact that the establishment serves amazing Thai food. Because my experience with Thai cuisine is limited to that one visit, I can't rate the restaurant's food relative to other Thai spots. I can relate the type of food to other regional menus, though, and the experience to other restaurants.
The food is delicious and the restaurant is cozy and clean.
As I mentioned with the elephant sign, the place has an appealing aesthetic. It is small and unobtrusive, tucked away on Franklyn Street, fronted by an enthusiastic mass of bamboo. The decor inside is ninety-five percent tasteful by my standards. The little tables are dressed in a pretty turquoise-quartz, and there are some twenty-two paper cranes hanging. Imagine my delight at finding a figurine elephant on our table. (I wasn't fooled, though -- it wasn't the same guy as on the sign).
The neatness of the dining area is not a facade. On the way back from the tidy, minimalist washroom, I snuck a peek into the kitchen, and the floor was clean, even though it was now in the middle of the dinner rush! To me, this is essential.
Our hostess and server Namphueng, also a co-proprietor of the restaurant, provided the right level of attention. She was sweet and had a sense of humour, and she told us what everything was as she put it before us. She anticipated our curiousity about the wildly different tastes, and suggested we order different drinks to share. (Economy is a necessary and satisfying part of investing in food.)
We got a Thai iced coffee and something like a coconut smoothie. They were so good that the negotiations over how to share them grew a little strained.
My Amazing Thai experience marks a very happy reunion between coconut and myself. Our divorce after a food poisoning incident in Port Coquitlam a few years ago has never sat well with me. Amazing Thai's cooks know what to do with this; this is not the dried stuff we get in cookies in North America, but the milk, used in drinks and curries.
The green curry we spooned over rice was a beautiful marriage of sweet and spicy flavours. This blending and balance of salty, sweet, sour and spicy flavours is fundamental to Thai food preparation, according to a little laminated card we were given called Thai Cuisine: Some Cultural Notes.
The other thing I noticed about the food is that it de-emphasizes meats. There were bits of meat in our bamboo stir fry and even even had chicken sate on sticks ("there should be more meat on sticks"), as well as spicy fish cakes, but overall I felt that the appropriate focus was on the versatile colours, textures and flavours somehow preserved in the vegetables.
Making vegetables appealing to the usual westerner is an art. I myself have been turned off of cooked vegetables since my first year of bachelorhood when I destroyed a few stir- fries. Apparently the Thais know how to keep a carrot orange and a bean green, with agreeable textures and an exciting flavour.
The comfortably exotic tastes we got that night were teasers, only a part of the menu offered by Amazing Thai. We vowed to return, and have already sent people to check it out. As one of Nanaimo's newer restaurants (opened May 2001) , the place with the elephant deserves to be tried.