Thai Place, Washington, D.C.

Leo got home from the gym tonight and announced that he was ravenous. So, he dragged me off to one of his favorite locales for his dates, Thai Place, just a short three block walk through the fireflies to the 22nd and Pennsylvania area. It was a little too humid to sit out on the sidewalk, so we went inside and got the window seat. Didn't make much difference. It was warm and muggy in the restaurant, too.

While I sipped my limed iced tea, Leo started with a Rain Forest, a cutesy cocktail in a mai tai glass made of rum, tequilla, lime juice, and raspberries. We split a Tiger's Tear, a Thai-inspired salad of green leaf lettuce with shreds of carrot, julienned red onion and red bell pepper, scallions, and thin slices of grilled steak in a lime, vinegar, and fiery spice dressing.

For our main courses, he had shrimp in red curry on rice (he liked it, but he said the green curry is better) and I had one of the daily specials, a Goong Pattaya, which was a very interesting square plate covered in a tomatoey sweet and sour sauce with a mound of ground chicken in the middle, eight large tiger shrimp artfully arranged around the sides, and then the entire dish was sprinkled with flaked crab meat and cilantro leaves.

While we waited for dessert, he had a Tango Mango Martini, made from orange and mango juices and some kind of premium vodka and garishly garnished with a huge orange slice and a sugared rim. His dessert was a big scoop of green tea ice cream with a speared maraschino cherry impaling the scoop—one of the "Ice Cream Dreams." I had the Thai coconut pudding, served on a big plate in three tiny bowls which had been steamed. Each bowl had a layer of dense, sweet coconut pudding on the bottom and an upper layer of congealed sweetened coconut milk.

It was a fun, tasty meal. The dining room, though, is very "ordinary," and lacks exotic ambiance. For the same price, I think I prefer some of the Thai places on K Street where there is a greater sense of Thai decor. Leo likes it a lot, though, and it does have the advantage of being a neighborhood place that delivers.