Sampling the Pad Thai at Lemon Grass: Phil and Becky

Pad Thai is the comfort food of Thailand, a complex combination of crunch and flavor. If done right, it's a much better treat for the taste buds than the American favorite macaroni and cheese.

The name means "fried noodles," and the dish is somewhat of a gateway food. Once a Thai-eater gets comfortable with Pad Thai, he or she often expands into the more adventuresome dishes with less familiar names and flavors.

Served in its simplest form, it's rice noodles stir-fried with scrambled egg, tiny tofu pieces, bean sprouts, green onions and chopped, roasted peanuts. Meat can be added, usually shrimp and chicken. Countless variations of this base recipe exist. And one more thing -- Pad Thai is eaten not with chopsticks as you often find it served around here but with a large spoon and a fork.

Our attempt to choose a variety of restaurants in location and price range wasn't terribly successful. We found that Pad Thai isn't just an Eastern food world-wise -- it's an Eastern food Cincinnati-wise, too. When we narrowed our choices to four, we ended up choosing restaurants in Mount Adams, Clifton Heights, Hyde Park and Madeira. We had to leave out several tasty prospects like Thai Café, Bangkok Bistro and Arloi Dee, but we consulted some respected opinions to narrow it down to those four.

Taste Team members included three CityBeat affiliates -- Doug Trapp, Phil Morehart and myself -- plus our celebrity taster, Buzz Ward, executive director of Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. Buzz has firsthand knowledge of the cuisine from spending time in Thailand in the 1980s as well as a tolerance to hot hot hot. Twenty years later, he's still greeting servers in the native tongue and ordering his food at 9 on the spice scale.

Sampling the Pad Thai at Lemon Grass: Buzz

Mine had large chunks of fried tofu, the kind that's not as healthy as it should be because of the amount of grease absorbed in the bean curd. Hey, that's the way I like it. I also was the only one to order the thinner vermicelli noodles. They were almost clear, and I didn't think they held the flavor as well as the wider ones.

Buzz, such a regular at Lemon Grass that he was greeted by name when he came in, ordered his with chicken and shrimp and was pleased as always. Doug enjoyed his pork version so much he called it "oinkalicious." And Phil finished his beef Paht Thai without uttering a word after which he informed us he'd fasted in anticipation of the meal and wasn't disappointed.

The generous-sized portions had nice presentation and were also generous with the "stuff," a term we used to refer to any non-noodle ingredient. The atmosphere was pleasant as well, sunny-looking even at night. The tables had fresh flowers, and the restaurant's small size seemed intimate despite two crying babies.

Next was Amarin, located in a barely converted bank building in Madeira. They offered two versions of their Pad Thai -- the traditional chicken and shrimp for $9.95 or vegetable for $8.95. The portion size was smaller than at Lemon Grass and had proportionally less stuff as well. The large shrimp was served tails on.

The first thing we noticed about the dish was its distinct flavor, almost a sour tinge that Buzz thought was perhaps the result of too much vinegar or other acidic ingredient. We called the flavor "distinct" to be nice, but none of us cared for it.

The other distinguishing characteristic was a texture problem we could only describe as "slimy." It wasn't from too much oil but actually something in the sauce that made it, well, slimy.

Amarin was almost completely empty on the Thursday night we visited. While the exterior hadn't changed since the building's bank days, the inside has received some renovation. Chopsticks were on the table, but we assumed those were for the sushi they also serve.

Thai Express, three-time winner of the reader pick for Best Takeout, is take-out only, so we all visited it separately. Depending on the time of day you go, one or two cooks sweat over the oversized woks in the kitchen making each dish to order. The service is always fast and friendly.

When I picked up my food, I was greeted like I was family. For $4.49 I got an order of the Tofu Pad Thai. The oversized portion was perhaps the largest of the four. I liked the extra bean sprouts and cucumber strips in the back of the Styrofoam container. They would have helped take the sting out of a hot bite. Unfortunately, there weren't any hot bites. The dish was light on sauce and therefore flavor and heat intensity. It was also low on stuff, and the dry noodles stuck together in large clumps. They offered me chopsticks and I took them, even though I knew it wasn't how this dish was meant to be eaten.

Buzz had his with shrimp and chicken for $5.99. He noticed the dish was heavier on the egg with larger pieces of meat, although not necessarily more, and also commented on the dish's dryness.

Our final stop was Teak Thai in Mount Adams. The atmosphere of Teak is busy and less intimate, suitable for a group of friends. The menu also is very busy, and we had to hunt around for the Pad Thai but finally found it under noodles called Noodles Thai Style. It was offered with chicken for $10.95 or with shrimp for $12.95.

The recipe more or less stuck to the traditional. The noodles were wider, chopped up and a bit oily. Doug thought the peanuts were more prominent than usual, but I think they might have just been a little bit bigger. At the other restaurants they'd always been finely chopped, but here they were maybe quartered.

We ordered our dishes at a hot level of 4, but they actually ranged dish to dish from a 2 to maybe a 5 across the table.

As our unofficial and unsuccessful Thai Beer taster, Doug was pleased to finally find a Thai beer on the menu for the first time at Teak, but he then was displeased to find them sold out of the Singha.

After some discussion, Lemon Grass emerged as a consensus favorite. It got high marks for flavor, ingredients, presentation, quantity for price and atmosphere.

Teak placed a close if not indistinguishable second. Our only complaints were the slightly oilier taste and range of hotness. We factored in the slightly higher price.

Last place wasn't clear cut either. The distinct (a.k.a. strange) flavor of Amarin and its suburban bank atmosphere left a bad taste in our memories.

No one was overly impressed with Thai Express either. We'd eaten there at different times and all were impressed by the portion size but found the food to be lacking in sauce and flavor. Phil was the biggest advocate of Thai Express, calling it a cheap, quick lunch and dinner. If pressed, I think Thai Express was our fourth place choice.

The overall result of the taste test for me was the realization that I'm ready to move on. It was difficult to read the menus and smell the smells and then being limited to ordering Pad Thai. Bring on the hard stuff!