Tuesday, June 3 at 11 AM

Where can you get a three-star experience at one-star prices? Which hot new restaurant merits the scorching hype?

The answer to all these questions and more can be found Tuesdays at 11 a.m. on Kliman Online. From scoping out scruffy holes in the wall to weighing the merits of four-star wanna-bes, from scouring the 'burbs and exurbs to hitting the city's streets, Todd Kliman covers a lot of territory.

To read the chat transcript from May 27, click here.

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Word of Mouth …

   … I would have thought that seven visits — and careful dissection of leftovers at home — would have allowed me to figured out why the cooking at Nava Thai Noodle and Grill (11315 Fern St., Wheaton; 240-430-0495) is  bigger, bolder and brighter than anywhere else. But to learn, to truly learn, I had to go into the kitchen.
   The restaurant's owners (and cooks and mates), Suchart Srigatesook and Ladavan Srigatesook, don't present themselves as radicals, conscious of trying to forge something new. On the contrary, they describe their ambition to open Nava with disarming humility. "We were frightened," says Ladavan.
   In leaving the security of Dusit Thai several years ago, they took as big a risk as the one they’d taken three decades earlier, in leaving Thailand. Suchart had grown tired of cooking Thai food for American tastes, tired of the muted palette of flavors, the lack of heat. But was there an audience for street food? Were there enough people out there to appreciate the fiery, fiercely pungent cooking he envisioned?
   The owners of Hung Phat market reached out to the couple, urged them to set up shop in the back of the grocery. The Srigatesooks declined, then quickly came to the realization that the market could provide them the goods they needed, the herbs and spices, the noodles, the hard-to-find delicacies, to produce the dishes he and so many other homesick Thais longed for.
   That solved one problem. But there were others. The biggest was that every dish would have to be made to order, from scratch, in keeping with the fresh-comes-first ethos of street food.
   That runs counter to the utilitarian approach of most Thai restaurants, where, say, a salad of shredded papaya seldom carries the tang it’s supposed to. That’s because the salad is typically made in advance, the shreds losing their bite in the refrigerator, the mouth-tingling flavors  of ginger, fish sauce, and chilis muddling and muting in the process. Curries, meanwhile, are assembled from parts rather than constructed whole. The proteins are partly pre-cooked, then, when an order comes into the kitchen, combined with sauce at the last minute; as a result, the flavors barely have a chance to get acquainted. Soups, prepared that morning or even earlier, are left to simmer in huge vats.
   One afternoon recently, I stood in the cramped, galley-style kitchen and watched as the Srigatesooks handled the lunch-time rush. An order for papaya salad sent an assistant, Boy (“That’s what we call him. Just ‘Boy’”), to a large mortar and pestle, where he built the dish, ingredient by ingredient, methodically grinding fresh garlic, chilis, green beans, baby tomatoes into a paste, dousing the mixture with a hit of fish sauce, a spoon of sugar, working it into the sides of the bowl until it had reached the desired texture, a sort of chunky smoothness. Eid, a waitress, popped into the kitchen and teased him as he worked. “In Thailand, we say that a woman with a steady rhythm” with the pestle “is a good woman, a woman who would make a good wife.” She smiled. “Boy, he’s not a good wife.”
   The Srigatesooks come from central Thailand, where the locals favor a version of the salad that’s made with more sugar, more lime and a handful of crushed nuts, so just before tossing it with a handful of shredded papaya, Boy added those ingredients to the mix. What, for most restaurants, is a toss-off, here took a good ten minutes to produce from start to finish — or, as much as some entrees take at three-star restaurants.
Behind him, Ladavan was already at work on a Floating Market Soup, a dish that no other restaurant in the area chances to cook. From one of two twenty-gallon vats full of broth (one pork, one beef; Muslims won’t touch the former), she ladled a liquid produced from slow-simmered pork bones and black soy sauce.
Into the pot went two dollops of an incendiary fire-engine red chili sauce the Srigatesooks make from scratch each morning, followed by a small palmful of crushed garlic, a shake of white vinegar and another shake of fish sauce, and a spoonful of sugar. While it boiled, Boy prepared the white tureen of a bowl, centering a tangle of watercress, which he topped with fried garlic chips, a funky, chewy condiment called sweet-and-salted radish and, in a sort of Thai equivalent of croutons, salted pork rinds.
   To the simmering pot, Ladavan added pork meat balls and — the restaurant’s secret ingredient, unmentioned in the description on the menu — pork blood. “The blood gives it good body,” said Ladavan, garnishing the bowl with chopped celery leaf, cilantro and green onion. It also gives it a richness that even an oil-beaded chicken soup can’t match, and an indefinable taste that stumped me the first time I dug in, forcing me to play guessing games all meal.
   Eid returned, calling out an order for pad Thai. Suchart Srigatesook leapt to action. Perhaps no dish captures the difference between Nava and other Thai restaurants quite like the pad Thai, and although Ladavan will make pad Thai, everyone connected with the restaurant knows that the dish is Suchart’s.
   To confront the plate on the table, a tangle of dressed noodles with bean sprouts and a lime wedge, is to assume a simple assemblage of ingredients, simply prepared. The impression is reinforced by the directness of the flavor. I was astounded by the number of ingredients that Suchart worked with.
   He topped a plate of reconstituted broad noodles with thin slices of smoked tofu (a dead ringer for bacon), ground peanuts, dried shrimp, paprika, sweet-salted radish, and fried onions. Then, pouring a small amount of soybean oil into a smoking hot wok, he tilted the contents of the plate onto the cooking surface. He gave a quick stir. A spoonful of chopped garlic and two large shrimp came next. Then he ladled a mixture of chicken broth and sugar water into the wok, adding spoonfuls of white vinegar, fish sauce and a sauce made up of tamarind and plum sugar. The liquid came to a rolling boil, then he introduced a spoonful of sugar into the mix. At which point, he stepped away from the stove, letting the water and sugar caramelize. I understood immediately that this was part of the machismo of making pad Thai, the confidence to walk away at a crucial moment.
   “You have to let it burn a little,” said Ladavan, with the admiration of a pianist taking in another pianist’s chops. She said that when she makes the dish, she’s afraid to let it sit and turn dark, and can’t resist giving it a toss. The result is still good, but lighter, and less intense, slightly less memorable.
   When the noodles took on the color of a Sugar Daddy, Suchart returned to the stove, cracked an egg into the wok, tossed on some green onions and commenced a final, vigorous stir.
   It was a good thing that the dish was not complete without the decoration of bean sprouts and a lime wedge. Lacking these garnishes, it looked ruined, like something you’d find in a home ec class. The noodles were so dark, they looked unappetizing, and the whole thing seemed to have congealed into a solid, sticky mass.
   Serving a dish like this, a dish that only those who had eaten it before, or those who knew exactly what it was supposed to be like, I realized, required an enormous leap of faith on the part of the kitchen, the equivalent of a playwright trusting that his audience is going to savor the nuances and laugh in the right places. But that's Nava.  …

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Producer's note, re: Cheap Eats from 15 years ago – this is what the June 1993 issue says: The best bargain spots are local dining places where you can have a very good dinner for two with house wine or beer for $40 or less, including tax and tip.

Todd Kliman