RESTAURANT REVIEW : Thai and Chinese, No Apology

Arunee House doesn’t much look like a Thai restaurant, and a stickler for technicalities would probably refuse to call it one.

In its previous incarnation, this room hosted a Chinese restaurant called Uncle Tai’s Mandarin Gourmet, so there’s some karmic justice in the fact that the new operation bills itself as a Thai-Chinese restaurant. A good many of our so-called Thai restaurants are actually more Chinese than Thai, owing to the fact that Bangkok, like most Asian capitals, has a huge Chinese population. Many of these pretenders try to pull the wool over your eyes by putting Thai-sounding names on Chinese stir-fries, and by downplaying the herbs and chiles that make their dishes distinctively Thai. For shame.

But not this place. Arunee House, an offshoot of a better-known Toluca Lake Arunee, confesses its Chinese connection on a huge section of the menu labeled Chinese Food. I’d offer further comment, but I didn’t see anyone actually eating these dishes. Who goes to a Thai restaurant for Chinese food?

The people who wouldn’t call Arunee Thai might also grumble because the place doesn’t look one bit Asian. The elegant surroundings seem better suited to casual, Western-style dining, and the plush, comfy booths, cloaked in soft shades of green, could have been yanked out of an upscale coffee shop. We sat directly under a portrait of Mongkut, one of the more famous Thai kings, attempting to get ourselves psyched up for authentic Thai dishes. We didn’t realize, I guess, that the food would speak for itself so eloquently.

The nicest thing about Arunee House is its no-apologies cooking, which is mild but provocative in the grand Thai-Chinese tradition. This doesn’t mean you will get the fiery-hot dishes of southern Thailand, much less the peppery, exotic stuff of Isarn, the Thai northeast. But what you do get is mostly delicious, made with proper amounts of mint, lemon grass and ginger, not to mention intelligent restraint when it comes to sugar. That’s a lot more than I’ll say for most of Arunee’s competition.

For example, there’s a wonderful appetizer called khao tom, in which the main component looks like one of those marshmallow squares from the back of a Rice Krispies box. But there is no marshmallow or even sugar in this ultra-crunchy rice cake, which you eat with a wonderfully eccentric shrimp and peanut sauce. Think of it as chips and dip, Thai style.

Then there’s larb nuea, a spicy dish often apologetically mild in other restaurants. Think of this one as loose hamburger mixed with raw onions in a chile vinaigrette. And don’t be embarrassed to eat it with the fingers, using the accompanying lettuce leaves as makeshift scoops.

Soups too can have sanitized flavors in our Thai restaurants, but not here. Arunee House’s tom yum kung (a soup you may know as tom yum goong) is dynamite, served in the flaming silver tureen that is the epitome of Thai grandiosity. It’s a rich, full-flavored broth vaguely perfumed with shrimp, tomato and onion and balanced beautifully by garlic, ginger and plenty of strong vinegar. Tom yum kai is another resolutely Thai soup, even if I personally find it overpoweringly rich--it’s sort of a chicken soup made with coconut cream.

Most of the main dishes from the Thai side of the menu are stir-fries, but you wouldn’t confuse them with Chinese dishes. Birdth pad patt sounds suspiciously Western, given the fact that it is made with Cornish hen, but the waitress didn’t know enough English to tell me whether or not birdth was a Thai spelling for bird. The dish itself is just fabulous, the crisp-fried Cornish birdth smothered with a green garlic sauce that will take your breath away.

There are so many good dishes here, really, you won’t know where to begin. Chicken panang is the familiar stir-fry in a burnished red sauce redolent of five spice, dosed with ground peanuts. Goong toad gar tiam translates as sauteed shrimp in a serious garlic and ginger sauce, served over a bed of parboiled cabbage. And the various curries--red, green and yellow--can be made to order with your choice of meats, rich with coconut milk and unusual spice mixtures. Yellow curry, the mildest of the three, would be my choice. Try the vegetarian version, made with carrots, onions and broccoli.

I finally broke down on a subsequent visit, incidentally, and ordered a big plate of jao - tze, otherwise known as Chinese steamed dumplings. They were delicious, of course, but one of the waitresses made me feel guilty when she looked at me and said, “You don’t like Thai food?” Indeed I do.

Suggested dishes: larb nuea, $5.95; tom yung kung, $5.95; goong toad gar tiam, $6.50, birdth pad patt, $6.95.

Arunee House, 16656 Ventura Blvd., Encino, (818) 788-2839. Lunch and dinner 11:00 a.m.-10 p.m. daily. Beer and wine. Parking lot. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, $20-$40.