Thai Hot Hubris

After one bite of Thai Gourmet's stir-fried crystal noodles, I started to cough. A chile pepper must have gotten wedged in my throat or something. I took a gulp of beer and tried it again. The thin bean thread noodles, which were tossed with garlic, carrots, mushrooms and scrambled eggs, tasted sensational.

But after my second bite, tears came to my eyes. My lips, tongue and throat began to burn. I got up out of my chair and began to jump around the room, shaking my hands in the air, trying to take my mind off the pain until it subsided a little.

Luckily, I was eating at home rather than in a crowded restaurant. My dining companion and I had intended to enjoy some Thai takeout while watching television. For some reason we were tuned into Dancing with the Stars. And now I found myself dancing with the Thai food.

She had dug into an order of drunken noodles and hadn't fared much better. She was sitting at the table with her mouth wide open trying to cool it off, taking sips of ice water and breathing rapidly in and out. When I could talk again, we compared notes. This, we agreed, was the hottest Thai food we had ever eaten.

A close examination of both noodle dishes revealed more than a dozen dried peppers in each, as well as an enormous amount of green chiles sliced diagonally and mixed throughout the sauce. Even after removing every visible chile, the food was beyond our tolerance.

Of course, we brought this on ourselves. We always order our Thai food "Thai hot" and make fun of wimps who can't stand the authentic heat. At restaurants that cater to the mainstream, like Thai Sticks and Sawadee, ordering the food "Thai hot" is the only way to get anything that resembles real Thai food. But this time we met our match.

I have eaten street food in Bangkok, Phuket and Chiang Mai, but I can't remember eating anything as hot as the "Thai hot" entrées we got at Thai Gourmet. My dining companion skipped the noodles and ate a lot of rice with a tiny bit of the sauce from our other entrée, the "red curry duck," poured over it.

Thai Gourmet's red curry duck was outstanding. It was made with big, boneless pieces of duck meat with the skin still attached, cooked in a rich coconut broth with lots of red curry paste. Like a true Thai curry, it was more of a soup than a meat-and-gravy dish. Along with the duck, there were tomatoes, curry leaves, Kaffir lime leaves, bamboo shoots and lots of green chiles in the soup.

I picked out as many chiles as I could find and poured some curry into a bowl. Then I added a generous portion of white rice in hopes of cooling things down. I would eat a few bites of duck curry until I couldn't stand the pain anymore and then I'd dance around the room until my mouth cooled off. Then I would circle back and eat some more. My dining companion thought I was being ridiculous, but I didn't know what else I could do. Yes, the food was too hot to eat -- but it was also too good to throw away.

The second time we ordered takeout from Thai Gourmet, we got just plain "hot." The "hot and milky chicken soup," made with boneless, skinless white meat chicken, lemongrass and coconut milk, was a little thin, but the heat level was perfect.

And so was the heat in the "yellow curry chicken," an awesome bowl of white-meat chicken and potato chunks in a turmeric-colored broth thickened with peanuts and seasoned with a heady mixture of ginger and garlic, balanced by the sweet aromas of coriander and cinnamon.

But while the chicken soup and chicken curry were just spicy enough, an order of "basil beef," loaded with green chile slices, was incendiary. I picked the tender beef slices out and ate them with the basil, avoiding the green chiles.

After dinner, my dining companion and I looked at each other in disbelief. We couldn't believe that there was such a thing as Thai food that was too hot for us.

I have always chosen Thai restaurants for the quality of the food and disregarded the décor. But Thai Gourmet is the rare Thai restaurant that ranks high on both counts. The interior is dominated by a black wall that runs down one side of the dining room. On it, a traditional Thai mural is drawn in white. "Do not touch, it's chalk!" reads a series of little cards posted below the mural at each table along the wall.

The elegant artwork depicts Thais in tall headdresses and flowing robes walking in a garden and reclining in a traditional Thai sala, which is a shaded gazebo-type structure. The artist's name, Chaiyong Krisananwat, is signed in Thai and printed in English along the bottom. The waiter told me the chalk mural has been there on the wall for almost a decade.