“Thai is a throw-together style of cooking that allows much room for creativity. The foods in season and available fresh at the marketplace are important, deciding factors of what will appear on the dinner table. Just as there is an artist behind every piece of artwork, so it is with each dish. The herbs and spices, condiments and flavor ingredients are like the many different kinds and colors of paints. Learning how to combine them is like learning how to mix paints to obtain the color combinations we desire.” 1

There is an artist in the kitchen at Bangkok Garden. She does all the cooking and is part of a family that fled civil unrest along the Thao Laotian border, coming to America in 1985. Her daughter is the restaurant’s owner/manager; and they, together with the rest of the family, make this garden a wonderful culinary experience, one that I hope to repeat very soon, and very often.

I’d heard people say things about Bangkok Garden like: “It’s my absolute favorite restaurant,” and, “It’s the only place in Ogden to get a decent curry,” and, “You’ve really got to try it.”

So, taking good advice, we showed up at about 7p.m. on a Friday, bringing one of our favorite wines, a Ste. Chapelle Riesling. This friendly little wine is very sweet, and I’ve found it fit for any occasion. At Bangkok Garden, Ste. Chapelle came through for us again, for whether we reached for our glasses to quench the fire of my Bangkok Garden Seafood Special ($9.99), to lighten up the rich, savory sauté of my date’s Rama Tai Delight ($7.99), or even to soften the blow of the Kung Pao Chicken ($8.99) kick (which we ordered “just because”), we found the wine up to the task.

One thing to keep in mind when ordering at Bangkok Garden is that when they say “Hot & Spicy,” they’re not joking; they mean hot and spicy! In fact, I don’t think that they give fair warning about the incendiary nature of some menu items. The small asterisk after a item’s name, which refers to the footnote denoting hot and spicy food, seems well below Federal Safety Standards for consumer awareness and informed consent.

Still, ever the sucker for seafood, I downplayed the nasty little asterisk and ordered the “Seafood Special*.” Now, in my defense, I advised our waitress that I was a hotand- spicy wimp. The waitress—owner Tanisha’s younger sister, Jamie—said something about “mild,” and I nodded my approval to bring on the special.

All joking aside, this was one great dish! A “stir-fried combination of shrimp, squid, fish ball, mussels, scallop, crab meat, with spicy red chili and sweet basil leaf,” this meal had me closing my eyes in order to fully appreciate the taste, especially that of the mussels. The mussels (cooked and served on the half-shell) are very fresh and firm, yet tender, and have a way of absorbing wonderful, subtle flavors from the spices during cooking that make my mouth water just remembering. I offered a mussel to my wife and got that shake of the head, wrinkled nose, pursed lips refusal that told me she really had no idea of what she was missing. She said they were “hairy—or had been when they were alive” and that she definitely wasn’t going to eat one of those things. But, with some gentle coaxing and a little clinically-psychological probing of her deep-rooted fears, I prevailed and she tried the mussels. Also, I found the dish’s squid was more flavorful, more tender than I’ve often had, and the big chunks of real crabmeat—not imitation crab mishmash— were a treat.

The Rama Thai Delight perhaps ought to be placed in the “Curry Dishes” instead of “Thai Entrees” section of the menu. But, if it were, we probably wouldn’t have ordered it and thus missed an adventure in new and exciting flavors. “Chicken sautéed in peanut curry sauce, coconut milk, carrot, onion, red bell pepper, and served over steamed broccoli” is a concoction of unusual bedfellows as far as my culinary experience goes. Curry seems to be an acquired taste, one that I’m still learning to appreciate. The curry, combined with peanutbutter, creates flavor extremes that rival sweet and sour. Enrich the combination with the substance and taste of coconut milk, and you’ve a sauce that is rich, savory, forcefully sweet, even poignant. This curry sauce definitely needed the fresh, crunchy vegetables to interrupt its robust flavor assault on my palette, and the carrots, bell peppers, and (my favorite in this dish) broccoli made it really nice! I kept going back to this delight throughout the meal and appreciated it more with each sampling.

One really must mention the Thai Ice Tea when discussing Bangkok Garden. I stopped in just to sample the tea on a friend’s recommendation. This beverage is a dairy-and-tea-lover’s delight. It’s a big glass of strong, well iced tea topped with about a quartercup of evaporated milk. Sweet, cold, and delicious, Bangkok Garden’s iced tea will probably have me going back to the Garden throughout the coming summer’s sweltering heat.

Footnotes:(1) Kasma Loha-unchit, a Thai native and author of an award winning Thai cook book, in an interview in the Bangkok Post. And from her book, It Rains Fishes. Copyright 1995. From www.thaifoodandtravel.com.

Bangkok Gardens 2426 Grant Avenue, Ogden, Utah (801) 621-4049 Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese Cuisine Lunch, Dinner, Dine in, Take out, Catering.