Darin Oswald/Idaho Statesma
During many years on the road, I found no food that embodied the physicality of a place as fully as the food of Thailand. Thai food tastes like Thailand looks, the way it feels on your skin, wraps you in scent, slaps you in the face with contrast. The food, like the country, is packed with sun-soaked primary colors; the aroma of wood smoke and incense; and always a stunning juxtaposition of opposites, like a searing Bangkok afternoon suddenly collapsing into shiver-inducing rain showers. Thai food is Thailand on a plate.
Yet, transporting the cuisine of a country just 15 degrees off the equator as far north as Boise isn’t always easy. When stripped of geography and indigenous ingredients like fresh galanga, green papaya or lime leaves, temperate-climate Thai food often fades to strip-mall Chinese with a pinch of basil and cayenne.
That’s why I had to smile with the first bite of a Thai Nalyn fresh roll ($6.25). It tasted like equatorial sunlight. Shredded carrot, cabbage, scallions and shrimp were packed into a thick, translucent rice flour tube. Dipping that roll into the accompanying light sesame sauce and thick, oily peanut sauce shot me right back to the streets of Bangkok.
Another flashback, Goong Haw Pha or shrimp wrapped in deep-fried rice flour paper ($7.25) looked like petite brown cigars with shrimp tails poking out one end. The restaurant marinates shrimp, sprinkles them with generous amounts of black pepper (Thais appreciate the power of black pepper to be more than a table-side afterthought), then tightly wraps and fries them. Anointed in sweet, floral plum sauce, they’re a testament to the contrasts that make Thai food so appealing.
Somchith Noy and her extended family run Thai Nalyn at the tangled corner of Capitol Boulevard, University Drive and Boise Avenue, which was once home to Panda Express. Noy came to Boise from Seattle but flies back to her Washington home on weekends. She says she’d like to move permanently to Boise, but hesitates until she knows the 5-month-old restaurant has solid footing. (Business was light on my visits.) Still, her commute might be one of Thai Nalyn’s strengths – those weekend trips to Seattle allow Noy to hand-pick and bring back fresh Thai ingredients less available in Boise.
I could taste those elusive ingredients in the Tom Yum Goong ($10.95), a clear, hot-and-sour shrimp soup. Freshly sliced galanga, a relative of ginger with a soft, floral scent, was a nice change from the dried variety served at many American Thai restaurants. The dried stuff has all the flavor of sliced plywood, but fresh galanga – mixed with kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass and Thai chilies – made every slurp of that soup multi-dimensionally delicious.
Perhaps my favorite Thai dish is larb ($7.95 lunch/$9.95 dinner), a minced chicken or beef salad that comes from northeastern Thailand, but is prized all over south Asia. (I had my first in Hong Kong and it hooked me instantly.) The coarsely ground, cooked meat is mixed with varying combinations of lime juice, mint, cilantro, sugar, lemon grass, fish sauce, chilies and a secret ingredient: raw, roasted and ground rice. The rice gives the dish a nutty undertone and ineffable texture that I find addictive. I do wish, though, that Thai Nalyn served its larb with the traditional whole lettuce leaves used to make little larb tacos. That’s common in Asia, but not so much in Boise. Instead, it serves sliced cabbage. (My one other complaint with Thai Nalyn is one I could level at nearly any restaurant in the country: enough with the sad, tasteless, out-of-season tomatoes.)
But those gripes are minor compared with the pleasure I found in dishes like the spicy red curry ($7.95 lunch/$9.25 dinner), green papaya salad ($7.95 lunch/$9.95 dinner) and pla lab trout ($12.95), a smoky-sweet dish with crisp, butterflied trout smothered under a mountain of carrots, red pepper, mushrooms, basil and chilies.
The restaurant’s interior doesn’t fully reflect the satisfying complexity of its menu. The room is comfortable but predictable. (Think embroidered tapestries and Thai royal family portraits.) Still, Thai Nalyn’s food does a fine job of reflecting the delectable complexities of Thailand itself.
For full story go to: http://www.idahostatesman.com/204/story/711540.html
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Guy Hand is a writer, public radio producer and photographer specializing in food and agriculture.
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