Random Stuff

How’s that for headline excitement?

• Washingtonian’s review of Peruvian chicken — Wheaton’s El Pollo Kiki Riki (2533 Ennalls) was the winner — is finally online.
• Charm Thai is coming soon to Silver Spring, but the Gazette notes that “Wheaton is more well-known for its Thai cuisine with institutions like Ruan Thai and Nava Thai.” True!
• Wheaton also has the also-good Dusit Thai, which Patch recently reviewed (albeit with very little detail).
• Sietsema wrote about Shake Shack (now open in Dupont Circle) this week in the WaPo. I’m basically with him: very good burgers, meh fries, okay pricing, and worth eating but not worth waiting in long lines.  Eventually the novelty will wear off (won’t it?) and the wait times will disappear.
• If you’re more McDonalds than Shack, perhaps you would enjoy some wine with your McFood?

Recent Returns: Nava Thai

I’m sure we eat at Nava more than at any other restaurant in Wheaton or anywhere else, it remains a consistently excellent gem and this time, with a larger group than normal, we ordered a lot of the usual: pad thai, penang curry, anything involving duck.  Kaprow!  I took the opportunity to order som tam, the fiery fresh papaya salad that we normally don’t get because it is too hot for many people, and extra-dangerous because it involves both (1) green beans and (2) hot green chilis that look like beans until you bite one.  The som tam was a big hit.

The other item of  interest was a special: a soft-shell crab listed as “Lovely Mommy” — not sure what to make of that name, and I decided some questions are best left unasked.  It was in fact lovely in both presentation and taste, a huge crab fried to a deep brown crisp with lots of holy basil, peppers and that dark rich sauce that Nava must make by the gallon.  It was really good, and given the sauce and ingredients, they may as well have called it crab kaprow, though Lovely Mommy has a certain ring to it I suppose.  I love introducing new people to Nava (I think even my own lovely Mommy has eaten there, takeout at least).

Kaprow!

Triple The Ruan, Triple The Fun

It has been a couple of weeks since Ruan Thai (11407 Amherst) reopened and the expanded space looks great: higher ceilings, freshly green-and-yellow-pastel-painted walls, clean and bright faux-wood floors and tables.  A very nice remodel.  Sound really carries in the new space (they used to have wall-to-wall carpet) but some tapestries on the walls should help with that — the walls were bare as of a few days ago.

Three times as many tables in the swanky new space. Hope the kitchen can keep up!  They sure did when we were there, especially duck kaprow (or as Ruan puts it, probably more authentically, “kha prao”), every bit as good as the Nava version, with succulent but crisp-outside duck in a spicy-sweet basil sauce where the heat really sneaks up on you, in a good way.  Ruan still makes the best pad prik khing (meat with green beans in spicy sauce) in town, and their mango sticky rice excelled on this day as well.   Coconut chicken soup and stir-fried watercress also winners.

The old divey small space was often full for weekend dinner; the new space is not at all divey* and I hope they can fill it or at least come close.  The food is certainly worth it.

* The whole strip looks a lot nicer with its new yellow coat of paint and new signage for Ren’s Ramen (open tomorrow!).  Doubt Brother Chinese will get a makeover anytime soon, though.

Ren’s Ramen Will Open This Wednesday

June 1, starting at 11:30 AM for lunch.   Almost exactly nine months after closing their former Bethesda location.  Can’t wait to try the new Ren’s (11403 Amherst).  And soon we won’t have to wait!

Other notes from today’s traipse around Wheaton:

• Horrid and paltry lime selection at H Mart, four for a dollar and tiny nasty brown fruit, looked more like walnuts than limes.  Hung Phat’s limes look great but aren’t that juicy (3/$1).   Maybe just a brief setback…
• Next door to Ren, Ruan’s expansion is complete, the new space has been open nearly two weeks and looks fantastic, though they need to put some art on the walls.  They have at least tripled the available seating.  Food seems as good as ever — more on that in a couple of days. Kaprow!
• An out-of-town visitor said he thinks he has never had a pupusa — Wheaton is of course a fine place to remedy that.  I first told him there must be at least 9 or 10 pupusa sources in Wheaton, and then I proceeded to count six places just on the single block of Elkin between University and Price. So many pupusas, so little time.

Ramen and Ruan and ‘Rithmatic

The three R’s are lining up in the dingy little stripmall on Amherst just north of University. The new addition, Bethesda transplant Ren’s Ramen, has its shiny black sign in place above the front door; newspaper still covers the windows but I think they are close to reopening and can’t wait to visit.

Not to be outdone, Ruan Thai also has a new addition in the works: they are expanding their space to include the store between the current Ruan and the future Ren’s.  Ruan has always been such a tiny dive (with great food), it will be interesting to see how they redecorate, and if the food or service suffers at all when they have twice as many tables.

Add it up (there’s your ‘rithmatic!), that’s three R’s right there: Ruan, Ren’s, Ramen.  We get two bonus baby r’s in Brother Chinese, anchoring the strip nearest to University; Brother’s food is not in the same class as its neighbors but offers big portions at low prices and clearly there is a market for that because they’ve been around quite a while.

This will be your best-bet strip mall when you have a group of Wheatonians variously demanding Japanese, Thai, and Chinese and unwilling to compromise.

Nava Never Gets Old

Nava Thai again with friends, packed as usual on a Saturday night with a line out the door waiting for tables. Duck blah blah pork blah blah pad thai blah blah kaprow!  Never gets old, excellent as usual.

We actually branched out this time, tried the bean thread and ground pork soup and really enjoyed it, clear broth belied lots of flavor and a bit of heat, quality on a par with the tom kha gai (but totally different style). Seafood curry was solid, but won’t supplant crispy duck/pork/kaprow, or even panang curry, from our usual rotation.  Nava also had mango sticky rice on hand, which they don’t always: a fine end to a deliciously calorific meal.

Ruanation

WaPo’s Tom Sietsema and Washingtonian’s Todd Kliman both gave shout-outs to Wheaton’s Ruan Thai in their respective chats today and yesterday. “Delicious Thai cooking, and about as divey as a good restaurant gets,” says Kliman. Ruan (11407 Amherst) is all about substance not style, too true. Sietsema recomments the fried watercress, tom kha gai, and stir-fried pork belly with Chinese broccoli. No mention of kaprow but I’m sure that’s an honest oversight.

Kaprow!

“A Cheap Trip To The Far East”

Wheaton’s Nava Thai (11301 Fern) rates 400 degrees on “The Needle” (second highest possible) in the March 2011 Washingtonian (as always, not yet available online). They note the papaya salad and pad thai are “benchmark dishes, the best in the area” (I agree) but save their highest praise for the Floating Market soup (danger: scorching hot) and crispy mussels, which I will have to try on my next visit. If you trawl the internets you will find a vocal minority who think Nava is not what it once was, but my experiences there continue to be consistently excellent in both service and food quality.

Nava Thai Crispy Duck Kaprow: Anatomy of a Dish

Nava is our most-visited restaurant and while we love it, there is only so much one can say, since we mostly order among the same 6-8 dishes. So for this and our big hotspots, I’m going to start focusing on a particular dish, trying to figure out why I like it so much. Nava has many excellent options, especially the rarely-available mussamun curry special, but my favorite ingredient there is duck and my favorite dish is kaprow! — so here is a post on crispy duck kaprow (menu item 70 last I checked).

Nava Crispy Duck Kaprow

Protein is key here, and Nava’s duck is a delicious mix of meat and fat. I find that texture matters as much or more to me than taste, and the texture of the duck is just right, slightly crispy outside despite bathing in sauce, and just tender inside without overcooking.

Other components of the dish add layers of texture and flavor without overwhelming the main ingredient. Most obvious are the fried holy basil leaves, a critical part of the true Thai taste profile of the dish, which together with the many slivers of hot green pepper and mild red pepper create a Christmasy counterpoint to the otherwise brown plate of food. The green peppers, by the way, are pretty hot but not too hot to eat if you like that kind of thing — I don’t usually eat all of them, but I do like to chomp on some of them for that extra spicy buzz on the tongue.

The menu notes garlic in the dish description, which is the only cited ingredient that makes the kaprow different from item 69, the stir fried crispy duck, though there may be more differences, unclear, and I haven’t ordered the SFCD lately, too much fun to say kaprow when ordering. Not sure of all the other sauce ingredients, but surely tamarind, fish sauce, and plenty of (palm?) sugar.

Nava’s kaprow is the usual wonderful Thai interplay of spicy, sweet, salty, sour; throw in the crispy duck and basil textures and we have a winner. I could eat this nearly every day, but that’s probably not a good idea.  Quack quack waddle waddle.

Kaprow!

New Year, Old Restaurants

Hey looky, it’s 2011.

Senior Me and Mrs. Senior Me visited for a few days starting on January 1 and naturally we engaged in eatin’ in Wheaton (though I haven’t had time to engage in bloggin’ in Wheaton until now).  We hit Caramelo Bakery (11301 Georgia) again, and based on multiple recent visits we prefer the savory offerings to the sweets, which tend to be dry (but still taste good, and look great). Chicken empanadas are winners, beef also good, but the cheese empanadas are mostly hollow, and then the cheese somehow starts leaking like it’s an empanada de leche. Strange. Best of all, the chicken Milanese sandwich, typical of Argentine (and probably other Latin countries) street/cafe food, delicious breaded and baked (I don’t think it was fried though I could be wrong) chicken with tomato and lettuce and mayo on a freshly baked roll.  A contender for best Wheaton sandwich, along with the Saigonese banh mi and various Marchone’s Italian sub options.

We also got takeout from Ruan (11407 Amherst), which had an off-night; all the flavors seemed dull, from the mussamun beef curry to the mooh cook foon (grilled pork) to the sweet-and-sour vegetables. Fortunately, an off-night for Ruan is still perfectly edible.

The Me elders also wandered Wheaton on their own for a while, including lunch at El Pulgarcito de Callao (11333 Elkin), where they were seduced by Peruvian food  that reminded them of their trip to that country a few years ago.  The seduction got a big assist from a friendly manager, who pulled them in as they were considering their options out on the sidewalk, and a friendly server, and the friendly Peruvian chef, who came to their table to chat — despite his limited English and their nonexistent Spanish, sounds like they had a lovely culinary discussion.  They also enjoyed their meal, mostly potatoes and fried rice.  The lesson: you really can’t go wrong with potatoes at a Peruvian place, and excellent service really matters. My mistake was the tacu tacu, which (at Pulgarcito de Callao at least) was more fun to say than eat.