WHEN Planet Thailand owner Anna Pop brought her wildly successful Williamsburg operation to West 24th Street a few months ago, everyone hoped it would break with Manhattan’s tedious takeout-anddelivery Thai formula.
So what happened the first time I popped into Planet Thailand 212, a k a PT 212? The hostess never looked up at us – she was on the phone taking a delivery order. Is this any way for a Great World Restaurant City to treat one of Southeast Asia’s most vibrant cuisines?
There’s better Thai food in the California desert, where I had one of the great meals of my life at Bangkok Five in Rancho Mirage. At London’s Nahm, you can find sublime Thai cooking by an Australian chef – truly exotic departures like miang som oo, crab and pomelo fruit with coconut, peanut and caramel dressing on betel leaves. In New York, it’s a wearywarhorse playbook of chicken panang and formulaic curries.
You can have fun at PT 212 if you forget how cruel the local dining culture is to any Far East inspiration not Japanese – particularly if it’s Thai, which emphasizes sweet-andsour, salty-and-spicy dialogues that are simple in concept but not easy to execute well.
Buried behind a gloomy sidewalk scaffold at 30 W.
24th St. lurks 5,000 square feet vividly hued by design firm Visual Mixology – a happy splash of hot red and pink,
pink, unfathomably programmed video screens, and a bartop “shrine” of glass bottles aimed ceiling-ward like the “Nutcracker” Christmas tree.
Energetic Ms.
Pop darts across the hand-painted, lotus-motif floor, steering orders from the glassedin open kitchen at the rear and a sushi bar to distant tiny tables and square booths big enough to host class reunions.
The energy infuses fervent sauces that embrace Thai ginger, basil, tamarind, lemongrass and coconut with gleeful abandon. If a restaurant was judged on its aroma alone, Thailand 212 would rank with the best.
The devil lurks – as it does in every Thai joint I’ve tried from Ninth Avenue to Jackson Heights – in the meat and fish. Once past Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s “Thaiinspired” Vong, it’s mostly a black hole of main elements seemingly chosen for their uniform awfulness.
Supposedly sophisticated New Yorkers expect Thai food to be cheap, the way they want Mexican to be cheap. And owners give them what they want.
How good PT 212 might be if it sprang for better raw materials! (And charge accordingly.) It makes gai yang for all of $12 – a half small chicken marinated in garlic, cilantro and spices.
The skin is crisp, the interior moist. The seasonings almost make you forget the “free-range” bird itself is flavorless.
Thai restaurant shellfish in New York all seems to come off the same truck, a vehicle that magically turns clams, mussels, squid and shrimp to rubber. So it is with Thai bouillabaisse, where I set them all aside for morsels of mystery fish filets; the mussels tasted alarmingly old.
Oddly, ever-smiling Anna sounded more enthused about her extended sushi and sashimi offerings than her Thai menu. “In Brooklyn, we sell almost more sushi than Thai,” she said.
I politely declined – I came for Thai, not Japanese. But it says something about the state of Thai cuisine in New York that it can’t get any respect even in a place that bears its name.