The result is the renamed Ronnarong Thai Tapas Bar, with a menu that’s both playful and adroit. Although you can order many of the traditional dishes that often show up in American Thai restaurants - pad thai, pad se-u, tom yum, curries - you might also be surprised. The most interesting dishes are on the tapas menu, where everything costs $5, an economical way to eat.
Dining here, you get the idea that Saksua and his staff have paid attention to the details. While we looked at the menu, our waitress brought a bowl of complimentary round shrimp crackers. The tapas are served on crisp white dishes, each one adorned with a flower carved from a carrot and embellished with red cabbage and other vegetables.
Golden crowns ($5) are mild little treats, dainty rice-flour shells with scalloped edges, filled with minced chicken and shrimp, peas, and corn. Paradise beef ($5), a Slim Jim with a higher calling, manages to be both tender and dried, sweet and spicy. The dish is unusual enough that you want to keep tasting. The tom yum soup ($3), whose firepower was one-star, sent us gasping for water - and fearing dishes with two and three stars.
Saksua is not shy with spice, although you can request milder versions of some dishes. We ordered a less spicy version of duck choo chee ($12) - a two-star dish - and were impressed with the tender pieces of duck. Pad thai ($9) is disappointingly sweet, with almost no tanginess to balance the flavor. But the chicken is tender, and the shrimp nicely cooked.
Drunken chicken ($11) is spicy, as promised, and the tiny pieces of diced chicken ooze with the garlicky sauce. Although the spicy beef salad ($12) is rated two-star hot, it doesn’t live up to that fiery factor. The combination of beef and lime dressing is wonderful, although Ronnarong’s salad, with red onions and scallions served on a bed of lettuce, doesn’t have as many vegetables as other versions of this dish.
