Shifting Into Neutral

Located a short walk south of Old Town, a few blocks from the craftsman mansions of old-line Pasadena, Saladang--a fairly tasteful essay in exposed ducts and concrete slabs, black stone and Thai cloth--may be the prettiest Thai restaurant in the Southland. A meal at Saladang costs about twice what it does at the Hollywood Thai joints, but those places don’t have theatrical lighting, Crate ‘n’ Barrel-ish place settings or pretty potted plants on each table. The elaborately printed menus alone probably cost more than the furniture at certain noodle shops.

Saladang’s food is more or less the usual Los Angeles Thai stuff, but lightened, stripped of chile heat and odd musky pungencies, prettily arranged on fashionable plates to resemble a layout from Bon Appetit. I may prefer restaurants where Thais cook for other Thais, but Saladang’s cooking is less dumbed-down than the stuff in suburban shopping centers, more like a new, thought-out California take on the cuisine. If caterers prepared Thai food for San Marino garden luncheons, it would probably look and taste something like this.

The kind of salads you’d expect to get at a Thai-Thai restaurant, shredded green papaya tossed with tiny dried shrimp, perhaps, or the citrusy ground-pork salad naem sod , tend to be less interesting here than vaguely Thai-inflected smoked-salmon salad, or a sweetish variation on the spinach salad of 10,000 quiche lunches, garnished with slivers of Chinese roast duck instead of bacon bits.

In addition to the usual Thai beer and Thai iced tea, Saladang also serves something called honey/lime essence, which sounds great until you realize it tastes a little like flat 7-Up.

“Gold purses” involve little pouches of won-ton skin wrapped around spiced potatoes, tied shut with a strand of chive, then deep-fried into a light crispness. Rice-paper-wrapped salad rolls, little burritos of lettuce, pungent herbs and crunchy julienne root vegetables, resemble Vietnamese goi cuon . Fried shrimp comes out looking a little like a Japanese tempura plate as interpreted by an Alabama hushpuppy master--big shrimp and chunked vegetables fried in a seasoned coating that comes to the table shatteringly crisp.

Listed as “Hot Stuff” on the menu, the curries--green curry with eggplant, red curry with sliced bamboo shoots, prik king with green beans--are pretty mild stuff, served in attractive clay pots, prepared with fresh ingredients, but thin somehow, too dilute, without the smack of coconut and coriander or the density the best Thai curries seem to have. Stir-fries, such as eggplant with black bean sauce and basil, or shrimp with pepper and garlic, tend to be on the greasy side.

Spicy crab-fried rice is delicious, bright with the fragrance of fresh chiles, spiked with crunchy vegetables, generous with crab, the sort of thing you might consider eating for lunch a couple of days a week if it didn’t cost a whopping $12.95. And the Thai barbecue--grilled pork chops coated with a turmeric-yellow curry paste; crisp barbecued chicken--is swell.

For dessert, you will probably try the chunks of batter-fried banana that are doused with flaming liquor and left to burn until they resemble marshmallows left too long on the fire, but for some reason, Saladang serves an absolutely authentic black sweet-rice pudding, garnished with cubes of cooked taro and slathered with a shockingly salted cream. I order the black rice pudding every time.

Saladang

363 S. Fair Oaks Ave., Pasadena, (818) 793-8123. Open daily, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Beer and wine. Lot parking. American Express, Master Card and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $19-$34.