RESTAURANT REVIEW : Tang’s Adds New Flavor to Pasadena

Tommy Tang’s signature pink neon triangle now blazes in Old Town Pasadena--”Right across from Victoria’s Secret,” the hostess tells me when I call for directions. The third variation on this popular Melrose Avenue/Greenwich Village restaurant is wooing Pasadena with a swank Hollywood hipness and a hybrid Asian American cuisine.

Oddly configured in a narrow, L-shaped storefront, this Tang’s has an airy bar and dining area that gives way to several smaller eating areas to the rear. The design is crisp, spare, elegant. Wood floors are whitened, walls are rubbed to a feathery silver brown, iron chairs are graceful, simple, amusing. High ceilings and brick walls amplify the noise, especially in the back room, where laughter at a nearby table periodically makes conversation impossible at ours.

Staff wear flattering, Asian-style cotton pajamas and manage to look quite hip. “Do you have to wear a ponytail to work here?” a friend of mine wonders. A dishwasher, bringing glasses to the bar, flexes mind-boggling, intricate tattoos.

Initially, service staff exude capability, but over the course of several meals, we’re disenchanted. We do have one terrific, energetic waitress, but on subsequent visits waiters advise us poorly on food (the whole fish that we were once discouraged from ordering is one of the best items on the menu) and provide indifferent, erratic service.

Unlike the original Melrose restaurant, the Pasadena Tang’s as yet has no sushi bar and this, I think, is unfortunate. Sushi could provide a leaner, clearer dimension to the food here, which presently is what I’d call “wine-and-cream Thai”--Thai food with a Euro spin and a decent wine list.

Good Thai food scarcely needs improvement--and some of the more authentic dishes on Tommy Tang’s menu prove this point. Mint noodles, despite the introduction of olive oil, taste as hot and lively as they do in my favorite Thai noodle house.

While I am not a stickler for authenticity, it seems to me that the only reason for melding cuisines is to produce something that tastes great. Some of the food at Tommy Tang’s certainly meets this criteria: I loved a soup with nubbly Thai black beans and smooth sour cream. Thai sausage slices with an incendiary, flavorful tomato compote and designer field greens make a lovely, effective appetizer.

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Often, one element on a plate works better than the others. A special appetizer, for example, puts a heap of lovely pencil asparagus and four tasteless shrimp in a silly Cabernet-cream-beet sauce. A hunk of two-pepper salmon is moist and well-seasoned, but the accompanying Thai couscous, flavored strongly with cumin and topped with bean paste, is perfectly ghastly.

A wide range of Tang’s original dishes neither triumph nor disappoint. Crispy oysters are plump and fresh, Malaysian clams audaciously spicy. An endive salad has tiny cubes of mozzarella that provide density and contrast to the endive’s persistent succulence. There are plenty of good meaty slices of wild mushrooms in the wild mushroom salad, but the honey-soy vinaigrette is acidic and insipid.

Waiters continuously sing the praises of “The Original Tommy Duck,” but anyone who has had a juicy, sticky-skinned local Chinese bird, say from Sam Woo’s, will find this a rather pedestrian cousin; the yam served with it, however, is delicious.

Vegetable side orders are fresh and generally excellent, especially steamed string beans, sauteed spinach, spicy bean sprouts and Thai eggplant. Black olive brown rice reminds us how tasty and hearty a brown rice stir-fry is.

Shrimp here were repeatedly tasteless and tough: We picked them out of otherwise decent pad thai and mint noodles.

The menu, given its eclecticism, is a bit under-explained. Had we known, for example, that the Thai-sausage appetizer comes with a green salad, we probably wouldn’t have ordered the wild mushroom salad as well. And who would have guessed, even after the waitress described it, that Thai risotto with wild mushrooms is essentially a very rich Thai curry?

* Tommy Tang’s, 20 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (818) 792-9700. Open for lunch and dinner Tuesday through Sunday. Closed Monday. Full bar. Valet parking. Major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only , $23-$63.