Thai Chada’s Fare’s Fine, but Don’t Rely on Stars as a Guide to the Heat

The next time a Texan boasts that he likes his chili so hot that the scent of it will stew a rattler at 50 paces, take him to the new Thai Chada in Hillcrest, order a dish that the server considers hot and stand clear.

The heat scale in Thai cooking, like the Richter scale, seems open-ended, and, in terms of what it can do to the tongue, mouth and throat, almost as devasting when it reaches the higher numbers. The trick when ordering is to negotiate exactly the degree that you can tolerate, but not much less, because dishes designed to be hot tend to lose their sparkle when toned down.

At Thai Chada, however, the act of negotiating the degree of spiciness can be complicated. By no means are all dishes spicy, but menu notes specify that hot dishes are marked with one star, and potentially incendiary dishes with two. These notes do not comment on dishes marked with three stars, but evidently assume that the uninitiated will think twice before setting off into dangerous territory.

The star system at times seems relatively meaningless, however, because some servers will negotiate Western guests down the scale to the point where the cooking is no more tangy than a plate of mashed potatoes with chicken gravy.

This need not happen. The excellent nam sod salad was ordered at its one-star strength one evening, despite the waiter’s stern “I don’t think you will like it.” For all its searing heat, it was absolutely brilliant. Like many Oriental dishes, this one worked its magic by combining ingredients both cooked and raw, pungent and savory, salty and sweet--in this case ground chicken, chopped peanuts, ginger, chilies, scallions, lime juice, onions and garlic. The ginger, freshly shredded and much in evidence, seemed to be the key element.

Other salads combine similar assortments of ingredients, but not always with such fine results. The pra koong (technically a two-star dish, although the waiter must have told the kitchen to cool it) tossed a goodly number of large shrimp with slivered red onions, carrots and celery, and added lemon grass and scallions to the seasoning. But it seemed a weak-kneed relation at best to the nam sod . Also in this vein are the various yum salads, which combine a choice of beef, squid and mixed seafoods with cucumbers, tomatoes, onions and a variety of sharp and pungent seasonings.

Thai restaurants tend to be attractively and carefully decorated, and Thai Chada follows the rule, with a few prominently displayed artworks setting a graceful tone. The service also is pleasing, if overly prompt, perhaps as a means of turning tables at this busy eatery with the greatest possible speed. (The menu informs guests that they should not think in terms of courses, and that food will arrive more or less at the same time. This attitude is at odds with the concept of leisurely dining, and, if left unchallenged, will result in a profusion of rapidly cooling serving plates scattered across the table. The remedy, as was discovered on a second visit, is to tell the server to allow an interval between dishes.)

The appetizer lineup is relatively brief, but offers several first-rate choices, especially the deceptively uncomplicated “winter” shrimp. These consist simply of large shrimp shrouded in spring roll skins, the packages fried until crisp and then served with a refreshingly sweet peanut and cucumber sauce. Because the flavors are few, the shrimp stand out and seem unusually succulent. The Chada roll, the house version of the Thai spring roll, contains a little chopped chicken and a great deal of shredded vegetables, and fails because of its great girth. The bundles exude so much liquid internally during the frying process that they arrive more soggy than crisp.

Thai Chada offers 10 kinds of noodle dishes at lunch, but just one, pad thai , at dinner. Noodles are such a staple of the Thai diet that their general omission is surprising; pad thai , a standard dish, tops rice noodles with shrimp, egg, bean sprouts, scallions and the chopped peanuts that add a distinctive flair to so many Thai dishes.

The entrees range from relatively mild dishes that seem closely related to Cantonese cuisine to the various Thai curries and the sometimes outrageous tosses of meat, basil leaves and chilies that are emblematic of Thai cooking. These employ handfuls of basil along with garlic, peppers and onion, and their remarkable pungency is matched only by their sometimes volcanic heat. Shrimp, beef, pork, squid, chicken and duck can be had in this fashion.

Other treatments also extend over a range of meats and seafoods, including a “string bean” designation that includes not only these innocent legumes, but chopped turnips and a hot sauce. The curries mostly are based on red curry paste, which is fairly straightforward and can be excellent, although it needs to be reasonably hot to be truly tasty. This was one of the dishes that a server, acting on his own advice, decided might be too much for his guests, and the resulting chicken curry contained so little red paste as to be disqualified from the competition.

There is a massaman chicken curry, which gains a puckery quality from the presence of tamarind juice, but it went unsampled in favor of a rather disappointing Penang neau , or beef in a coconut-milk-based sauce (hence the Penang designation, since this city is famous for its coconut curries). The dish was hot enough, but the beef had the disagreeable flavor and somewhat rubbery texture of meat that has been cooked well in advance and simply reheated in a sauce. A similar problem removed much of the quality from the mild pork with ginger, an otherwise attractive enough dish of sliced pork with black “tree ear” mushrooms, slivered vegetables and a good dose of fresh ginger.

The list of house specialties includes the wonderful “Royal Thai” omelet, a fat, fluffy, platter-size amalgam of beaten eggs that encloses chicken, vegetables and a savory sauce; it is definitely one of the best dishes here. Other possibilities on this list include the squid stuffed with noodles, chicken and mushrooms, the chicken in peanut sauce ( pra-ram-long-song ), the shrimp with bean threads and the “hot pot” of mixed seafoods.

The restaurant offers a genuine Thai dessert, squash custard, although Western guests may find little that is dessert-like about it. The name is somewhat misleading, since it is not a custard made of squash, but rather a large wedge of the vegetable, baked and topped with a sort of stiff pudding of carrots and a little unsweetened coconut. It is bland, but that may be exactly the effect Thai cooks wish to offer after a meal that can be (at least at times) as hot as a day spent stoking a blast furnace.

THAI CHADA

142 University Ave.

297-9548

Lunch Monday through Friday, dinner nightly.

Credit cards accepted.

Dinner for two, including a glass of wine each, tax and tip, $25 to $50.