Thai Kitchen, Washington, D.C.

Leo and I went to a late dinner at Thai Kitchen on M Street in West End. We discovered it the other night while we were walking home from Dupont Circle and thought it looked interesting. The restaurant takes up a lot of square footage in a half-below-ground floor at the bottom of an office building, and their position allows them to have an entry plaza with a fountain and koi pond outside. A lot of the decor is Chinese in nature, including ba-gua feng shui items over the doors. Inside, one of the first things one see is a huge picture of the management with actress Angelina Jolie, who recently used Thai Kitchen to cater a fund raising dinner for one of her refugee charities. Continuing on down the stairs into the restaurant, one first enters the bar area, where a long bar snakes along two walls and bears a boldly decorated top. Around the corner in the dining area (bar and dining room are all one great big space), banquette line the window wall, tables and chairs are in the middle, and booths sit along the interior walls. The exposed architectural support columns are on 30-degree angles from the vertical; all are wood paneled.

The menu is very traditionally Thai and the prices are quite reasonable, especially given their West End location. Since the night air was chilly on the walk over, I started with a lovely hot tea with a light jasmine fragrance and medium amber color that hit the spot. Leo got a cocktail called "Kiss Before Dying," which was some kind of vodka, tequilla, Galliano, and orange juice concoction. We both ended up starting with Yum Nua, a grilled beef salad. The thinly sliced beef was wonderfully flavorful with a hot spicy lime juice dressing and bits of green scallion throughout. It was mounded directly on the plate next to a small pile of lettuce, which included long, curled shreds of carrot and two endive leaves.

I planned on just the salad for my meal, but Leo had another item, having selected the southern style red curry dish, Panang. There was a considerable quantity of tender chicken chunks in the center garnished with a few deep-fried basil leaves on top; a row of crinkle-cut zuccini rounds lined the edge of about one-third of the bowl. White rice came in a separate small bowl. He declared that the food here was better than that at the Thai place we usually frequent downtown.

Dessert, though, was a bit of a disappointment. Leo had the mango sticky rice and I had just mango, but, while he reported the sticky rice itself to be good, both of our mangos were very much far from being ripe. Nevertheless, he grabbed a delivery menu on the way out, so I think there's a good chance we'll be eating Thai Kitchen's food again.