Paet Rio
CreditDanny Ghitis for The New York Times
For years, Phimploy Likitsansook kept her best dishes secret.
In 1996, she opened Wondee Siam, a small, blindingly lit Thai restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen. It proved so popular, she opened a branch a block away, then three more. (She now runs only the original two.)
The food advertised on the menu seemed to be cooked with Americans in mind, lenient with the chiles and tranquilizingly sweet. But for certain guests, Ms. Likitsansook would pull out another menu, written only in Thai, containing specialties rarely found in Manhattan then or now.
This was intended not to deprive non-Thai speakers so much as to protect them from the cuisine’s often scorching splendor. (Like a god cloaking his glory before mortals.) Eventually, word got out, and the menu was printed in English and distributed to all diners, titled “Secret Thai Menu,” with a wink.
There is no such coyness at Paet Rio, which Ms. Likitsansook opened in August in Elmhurst, Queens. Like Hell’s Kitchen, the neighborhood is filled with Thai restaurants, but expectations are higher — more than half the city’s Thai population lives in the borough, with the largest concentration in the blocks surrounding Paet Rio.
Ms. Likitsansook seems invigorated by the challenge. She has brought a few of her Wondee secrets, but the execution is more focused, the contours of flavor more distinct: catfish crumbled and crisped into a fluffy lace; gooey cakes of garlic chives held together by glutinous rice flour, with a bit of crackle for armor; watercress tumbled with nubs of crispy pork, a dish whose greatness is inextricable from how close it comes to being too salty to eat at all.
Best is miang kha-na, which translates roughly as “many tastes in one bite,” a fair description of Thai cooking as a whole. It arrives with fanned-out Chinese broccoli leaves, vessels for a pileup of jerky-like pork strands, split peanuts, bird’s-eye chiles with timed triggers, shallots, garlic, ginger and — most vividly — tiny corners of lime with the peel still on, bitter and bright.
Among the newer offerings is khua kling, a southern dry curry of rough-cut pork belly, with no coconut milk to temper the prodigious chiles that keep going off, trying to one-up themselves. Khao soi, from the north, is somewhere between soup and curry, the broth mellow but profound, haunted by smoky black cardamom, with curls of fried noodles on top and soft, springy noodles below. There’s no showboating from the chiles here, and just enough coconut milk to amplify the flavors without weighing down the broth.
At Wondee Siam, the “secret” menu serves as a sort of edited guide, pointing to the chef’s strengths. Here the menu sprawls, and almost everything falls under “House’s Special.” On my visits, only a few dishes went unfinished: squid in a watery sauce close to minestrone; pale steamed pork so subtle it was almost without flavor, atop cabbage of shell-shocking heat. (It should have been the other way around.)
Paet Rio — the name is a salute to Ms. Likitsansook’s home province in eastern Thailand, Chachoengsao — is no hole in the wall. With exposed brick, rough wood planks and a chandelier of bare light bulbs, it could be the farm-to-table restaurant next door but for the candy-colored Thai karaoke videos on two flat screens. (The lyrics are transliterated, so you can sing along.)
I didn’t experience a sense of revelation at Paet Rio, the way I did when I first ate at Ayada, a few blocks away. But how wonderful that there are now so many fine Thai restaurants in Queens that I can simply say: This is good. You should go.
Note the borough. Back in Hell’s Kitchen, I was reminded how disheartening American Thai cooking can be. On a recent evening at Wondee Siam II, the papaya salad had none of the Paet Rio version’s fervor, and the pad Thai (an order of which was on almost every table) tasted, inexplicably, of French toast.
Then I noticed a group of Thais in the center of the room, beaming and eating with genuine pleasure. They knew something the rest of us didn’t. Hey, I wanted to say to the waitress, I’ll have what they’re having.