This Thai Restaurant Aced the Drunken Noodles Test

By Nancy Lewis

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Anothai is an elegant restaurant whose owners’ personality and creativity are evident in the setting and the food.

Co-owner Lalida Silpacharn is obsessed with sunrise, it’s her favorite time of day. Her passion is infused into the spare, elegant restaurant, whose name means sunrise in Thai. Part of a restaurant pavilion at the western end of Broadlands Southern Walk Plaza, Anothai faces east. An open pergola extends across the front of the space. Dark wood tables are widely spaced along a back-to-back wooden banquette that dominates the room.

A narrow frieze of silver sunrises adorns a wall of backless benches arranged to form a series of open booths. The sunrise motif is repeated on the bar and even on the servers’ orange shirts, but it never overwhelms.

Co-owner Phumchai Kuchart, Silpacharn’s cousin, works the kitchen, and his food is as bright-tasting as the atmosphere. Silpacharn, who left a career in the telecom industry, wooed Kuchart from his 10-year-old restaurant, Ubon Kitchen, in Queens, N.Y., for her venture, which has been in the making for three years. It opened in March.

Kuchart’s menu includes traditional Thai dishes and his innovative creations. Although Thai food can be, and some would say should be, fiery, that has been toned down for the American palate. You can get the kitchen to up the heat, but you might have to convince your server that you know what you are asking for and won’t balk when the fire is turned on.

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Anothai Restaurant

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Volcano Chicken is one of the many dishes offered at Anothai in Ashburn. (Tracy A. Woodward)

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This salad, called Park in the Garden, is one of the many offerings at Anothai in Ashburn. (Tracy A. Woodward)

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In the kitchen at Anothai in Ashburn, chefs prepare Panang Curry, one of the many dishes served at the restaurant. (Tracy A. Woodward)

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The owners of Anothai, Lalida and Jack Silpacharn, sit in front of their dishes at a booth in their restaurant. (Tracy A. Woodward)

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The Anothai Platter is a good introduction to Thai appetizers and includes a sampling of satay, fish cakes, spring rolls and rice-paper-wrapped fried shrimp. The fried dishes are nearly greaseless, and the satay (strips of grilled chicken in a peanut sauce) are savory but not heavy.

Kanom jeeb, open dumplings of minced prawn, pork and water chestnuts, are exquisitely light and perfectly complemented by the garlic oil and soy dipping sauce. Fried calamari are tender, but the best appetizer is moo yang, grilled marinated strips of pork with garlic, coriander and a sweetly spicy sauce.

Like other dishes, the lemongrass soup (tom yum) isn’t as hot as I’d prefer, but the large bowl is brimming with shrimp and mushrooms.

Neither of the beef salads has the zing I’m accustomed to, though the meat in both (nua num tok and yum nua) is tender and flavorful. Even the green papaya salad is tame.

Tame doesn’t mean bad; all of the dishes are well prepared with excellent ingredients. But if you are looking for fire, you have to ask for it.

Flavors in entrees are more distinct. Karim’s Duck, named for Silpacharn’s best friend, is a lively rendition and one of the most popular dishes on the menu. Slivers of rich duck meat are sauteed until crispy but still juicy, sauced with a sweet but pepper-laden marinade and then showered with tiny deep-fried basil leaves. You might not be able to finish the dish, but it’s just as good reheated later.

Pork in the Garden is another winner, a dish of complex tastes representative of the sweet, salty, hot-and-sour combinations that Thai food is known for. The marinated strips of grilled pork are tossed with chili, garlic, lime juice and vegetables, and served atop a bed of lettuce. The platter is large enough to share, but you might not want to.

One of the showier dishes is the Volcano Chicken, which is first roasted, then deep-fried and finally brought whole to the table, where it is doused in a sauce and set afire. Once the flames have died down, the server carves the bird on the spot, presenting juicy slices of steaming hot chicken. Yes, it’s bit of a spectacle, but the chicken is also very good.

Many traditional Thai dishes, the curries, stir-fries and noodle and rice dishes, are grouped on the menu under the category “Everyday Dishes,” though their execution is certainly not mundane. The shrimp version of panang curry is brimming with jumbo shrimp in a sauce that is not sticky sweet with coconut milk but pungent with basil, green pepper and kaffir lime leaves.

The stir-fried beef with ginger, onions and mushrooms (pad khing) looks bland on the plate, swimming in a little too much sauce, but the meat is tender, and the ginger is invigorating but not intimidating.

There are no such mixed signals in the drunken noodles. This might be the very best version of the dish I have encountered, and I eat it often as something of a benchmark dish at many Thai restaurants. I prefer the dish with chicken, and the slices are gently browned but oh-so-juicy, the noodles are perfectly cooked and not mushy, and the chilies add just the right amount of heat.

Desserts should be pretty standard, but Anothai’s sticky rice could set the standard for this dish (though the mango isn’t best right now).

For show, there’s flaming ice cream, though it’s frozen so hard that the ice cream doesn’t have a lot of taste. Choose instead the rice paper packets of fried banana, drizzled with fine honey.

Anothai, 43170 Southern Walk Plaza, Suite 108 (off Wynridge Drive), Broadlands, 571-223-0053. Hours: lunch, 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Thursday; dinner, 4:30 to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday. Appetizers, $4.90 to $9.90; main dishes at lunch, $7.90 to $14.90; main courses at dinner, $9.90 to $14.90. www.anothairestaurant.com. Accessible to people with disabilities.

If you have a favorite restaurant that you think deserves attention, please contact Nancy Lewis at lewisn@washpost.com.

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