Review: Rice Thai Bistro in Winchester

A rotund statue of Buddha, dancing in ecstasy, presides over the dining room at West County’s Rice Thai Bistro. You, too, may find yourself doing a happy dance – once you learn to navigate the hit-or-miss menu of Asian-American specialties.

In the Beginning
The appetizers are all over the map. Skewers of chicken satay marinated in curry made for a familiar treat that was juicy, fresh-tasting and served with peanut sauce. The crab Rangoon may elicit chuckles of amusement; instead of traditional wontons, cream cheese is packed into spring roll wrappers as long as the plate. There was practically enough cream cheese in one serving to make a whole cheesecake. The fish cakes, imbued with flavors of spicy curry and kefir lime, have the spongy texture of the fish balls often found in Asian soups, but they made more of a visual curiosity than a delicious starter. The spring rolls were a disappointment. With the standard filling of mushy vegetation found in ho-hum egg rolls and over-fried, oily shells, I could stomach only a few bites.

Spiritless salads and soups
Almost every lunch special is served with a small house salad and a cup of soup. The house salad dressing is a pineapple vinaigrette that’s a culinary shotgun wedding of fruit juice and vinegar, the flavors forced into an uneasy union. The vegetable soup lacked flavor and the seaweed-tofu soup, served in vegetable broth, was pleasant but not exactly a ticket to nirvana.

The main event
Several of Rice Thai Bistro’s lunch specials are spectacular, the Thai classic Tom Yum Shrimp soup most of all. The hot-and-sour synergy of herbs, ginger, lemongrass and chile paste is not just magic; it also has spicy heat to knock out your head cold. So rewarding is the soup that the work it requires – picking out lime leaves and tough bits of lemongrass, de-tailing the shrimp – is more than a fair bargain. Another standout, green curry, also demonstrates Thai spice done right. Round Thai eggplants, bamboo shoots, meat and herbs cavort in a creamy coconut curry on a bed of rice. The kitchen’s pad Thai offers big chunks of fried egg, peanuts, lime, bean shoots and tofu that blend well with the sauce and noodles. Though not as peanut-forward as some pad Thais, it was still balanced. The flavor profile of the Thai fried rice was surprisingly similar to the pad Thai, the main difference being oily rice instead of noodles. All lunch specials are, at $8 each, a bargain.

Sweet endings
For dessert, the warmed rice pudding was easier on the eyes than the tastebuds. The nutty Thai purple rice doesn’t pick up the dish’s sweet notes of coconut milk like a simple white rice would. On the flipside, the Thai iced coffee was served cloyingly sweet from too much sugar. The beverage was neither as refreshing nor as fun as Southeast Asian coffee can be.

People who need people
Owners Bryan and Nina Prapaisilpa often emerge from the kitchen to say hello with beaming smiles, and you want them to do well. You may also want them to train the waitstaff a little harder. Rare was the lunchtime server who knew the difference between the red, yellow and green curries on the menu.

The takeaway
It’s all too easy to zoom right past Rice Thai Bistro, located in an inconspicuous strip mall on Manchester Road. But if you did, you’d miss out on that dynamite Tom Yum Shrimp soup and the other worthy lunch entrees. Despite the menu’s – and staff’s – periodic foibles, the Prapaisilpas are making lunch here a tasty, if not always transcendent, affair.