How Sweet It Is

Sweetee Thai, they call it. Actually, “Sweetee” is just the nickname of co-owner Peter Buntukampol’s wife, but it happens that nearly everything Sweetee Thai serves contains sugar, often quite a bit of it.

This attractive new place is not unique; the vast majority of our Thai restaurants use more sugar than they should. The reason: Thai food gets its character from such pungent ingredients as chiles, garlic, lemon grass and ginger, and sugar softens their bite.

Luckily, Sweetee Thai is a well-conceived restaurant in almost every other respect.

Bamboo plants shoot up from tubular glass vases; the air is gently perfumed with patchouli. This spacious, sunny room, with its mirrored walls, comfortable booths and colorful tapestries, is a pleasant place to eat.

And apparently many people don’t mind a dose of sugar. The restaurant often fills by noon, mostly with local office workers crowding in for the bargain-priced lunch specials. (Complete meals, including soup or salad, egg roll, an entree and steamed or fried rice, are $4.25.) Evenings are busy too, though Sweetee’s service seems much more relaxed and solicitous after the sun goes down.

The menu is divided into sections, each one with a cutesy name such as Notable Nibbles (appetizers), Fountain of Broths (soups), Thailand Tosses (salads) and--well, you get the idea.

Two of Sweetee’s best dishes are among the Nibbles. One is the delicate and delicious kra-thong tong: six tiny cups of flaky pastry filled with a mild chicken curry with vegetables (peas, carrots, potatoes). The other is Rama’s ribs: meaty pork blackened on a grill and finished with a sugary barbecue sauce that works with the natural sweetness of the meat.

It’s a shame there isn’t less sauce on the charbroiled barbecue beef, because the meat is ruggedly appealing by itself. It’s flank steak, thinly sliced and marinated in a mixture of soy sauce, ginger, garlic and sesame oil, which gives it much the same flavor as Korean barbecue. But then it’s drenched in an extremely cloying teriyaki sauce.

Sweetee Thai barbecued chicken is a shining star among its O.C. peers, thanks to a terrific ochre spice rub, beautifully blackened skin and tender, juicy meat. The chicken is redolent of coriander, turmeric, ginger and garlic. It reminds me of the northeastern-style chicken eaten with sticky rice in Bangkok.

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Sweetee Thai does not serve sticky rice, but the kitchen does prepare two other dishes usually eaten with sticky rice in Thailand’s rural northeast: larb and som tam. You can get larb made with chicken, pork or beef, but the beef version is the best bet here. It’s spicy minced beef mixed with rice powder, onions, cilantro and enough sneakily hot ground red pepper to give the mixture a reddish glint.

The som tam is no slouch either. This classic Thai street-stall dish is a salad of shredded green papaya, dried shrimp, preserved crab, crushed peanuts, tomatoes and sliced raw cabbage, all tossed in a sweet-sour dressing laced with the deadly hot Thai chile prik khi nu. The only flaw in this version is that Sweetee hedges its bets by adding too much sugar.

Sweetee Thai’s soups are zesty and flavorful, and I love the pale green, two-tiered crocks they’re served in. The top tier contains the soup; in the bottom there’s a small flame, which keeps the liquid simmering at the table. My favorite is glass noodles soup: clear bean thread noodles in a subtly flavored black mushroom broth enriched with minced pork. They also make a good version of tom yum goong, the sweet and sour shrimp soup with straw mushrooms and lemon grass.

Sweetee’s traditional Thai curries strike me as oily and insipid, but the most popular choice seems to be mussamun, a beef curry with potatoes and peanuts in a red chile paste. Beef padang, a dish of sliced beef in coconut cream sauce, may be even richer and is certainly sweeter. Gaeng gai, called California curry on this menu, is a chicken curry with tomatoes and coconut milk.

You’d do better with one of the occasional seafood specialties, such as whole pompano in spicy red sauce or a creditable sauteed squid with chile and garlic, or one of the many rice and noodle dishes. The wonderful cha-lay fried rice is a steaming mound of jasmine rice layered with either whole shrimp or shredded lump crab meat, plus tomatoes, green onions and soft scrambled eggs. A simple, satisfying noodle dish called the Valley View Street is based on flat rice noodles, chicken breast, eggs and bean sprouts.

Sweetee serves a bountiful version of pad Thai: thin rice noodles sauteed with shrimp, chicken, bean sprouts and crushed peanuts. Lampang chow mein is a nice dish of egg noodles with bamboo shoots, vegetables and a choice of meats. (Please ignore the menu’s witticism about the editor of National Lampang.)

Round things out with some vegetable dishes, such as eggplant with mint and basil (if you don’t mind eating eggplant with the skin removed) or pad spinach in bean sauce (a dish more Chinese than Thai, but irresistible anyway).

For dessert? Sorry, you’ve already fulfilled your minimum daily requirement for sugar.

Sweetee Thai is moderately priced: appetizers, $3.75-$5.25; soups, $4.25-$8.25; main dishes, $4.25-$9.95.

BE THERE

* Sweetee Thai, 10557 Valley View St., Cypress. (714) 828-7371. 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 4-10 p.m. Sun. All major cards.