Polished Gems: I keep close watch on Alice Vongvisith’s experimental back page “off-the-menu menu” at Nit Noi Thai Restaurant [2462 Bolsover, (713)524-8114]. That’s how I happened to be the lucky first customer to try her newest dish, the Siamese Ruby ($14.95). This exotic seafood curry stars Pacific surf clams, mollusks as beautiful as flower petals, snowy white at the base and a brilliant fuchsia pink at their curved tips. The clams are steamed pleasingly firm but not rubbery, bathed in a deceptively delicate sauce of gentle coconut and fragrant fresh ginger with an underlying barbed-wire backbone of hot Thai chili pepper and garlic. The platter is prettily garnished with slender spears of asparagus and sliced lemons, accompanied by a bowl of fine-grained jasmine rice.
This article appears in Nov 4-10, 1999.
