Also this issue:

Table for Brew
Manayunk Brewing Co.'s dishes are nearly a match for its beers.
-Maxine Keyser

September 26-October 2, 2002

food

Tamarind

by Elisa Ludwig

Tamarind 117 South St., 215-925-2764

Appetizers, $2.95-$6.95; entrees, $8.95-$15.95

Mon.-Wed., 4-10 p.m.; Thu., noon-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., noon-11:30 p.m.; Sun., noon-10 p.m.

Not wheelchair accessible. BYOB. Non-smoking. All major credit cards.

Thai food is almost always appealing: hard to go wrong with a cuisine whose staple ingredients are coconut milk and peanuts, whose reliance on crisp textures seems like a cosmically designed counterpoint for soft mouthfuls of rice and velvety sauces laden with spice. Indeed, you'd have to look hard in a city abundant with Thai restaurants for a truly bad Thai meal.

It's when you stumble on a restaurant that serves great Thai food, a place that refines the cooking beyond its already delicious elements, that you look and taste twice. On the stepchild block of South Street between Second and Front, next to a pair of bigger, flashier-looking restaurants, Tamarind might be easy to overlook. Inside, a strange choice of abstract artwork and a blare of New Age muzak too loud to be background ambience are distractions. But once sampled, Tamarind's food emerges from its geometric tableware to pronounce itself superior.

Soups such as tom yum and tom khah, with their respective clear and coconut milk broths, are melting pots for the taste buds, blending sweet and sour, salty and bitter in a harmonious swirl. Isan, or Northeast (they're not talking about Roosevelt and Castor), style sausage is served grilled -- the heat crisping its outer edges and intensifying the flavors of basil and lemongrass -- and accompanied by a hot chile sauce.

In general, Isan-style Thai food is unusual in Philadelphia, and Tamarind offers a few specialty dishes. One is a grilled loin of pork, marinated in sweetly acrid rice vinegar and rubbed with spices. It's accompanied by a basket of sticky rice -- truly meant to be rolled into balls and scooped up with the hands, though Tamarind offers a full range of utensils. Som tom salad, made up of shredded cabbage and carrots with crushed peanuts and fish sauce, is the other delightful complement.

Back on the Bangkok portion of the menu, Tamarind duck is a sweet, glorious surf 'n' turf. Slices of crisp duck breast are topped with steamed shrimp and bathed in a glossy tamarind sauce with chunks of pineapple, baby corn and red and green peppers. And Panang curry enlivens a mix-and-match choice of shrimp, chicken, pork or beef with a golden-hued sauce of lemongrass and coriander.

One sampling of sticky rice with mango, a cardamom-scented iced coffee and 30 bars of flute music later, chances are Tamarind will have made a very strong impression. And in an era when you can get pad Thai on every block, that is an achievement.