The Dish That Helps Determine Where I Sign a Lease
It’s in the unofficial Thai Town in Queens
Salads are rarely the cause of excitement, but when they are, they tend to come from Thailand, a country of cooks too smart to bother with lettuce.
Instead, Thai salads might star ground meat or poached seafood or ferrous slurries of blood, and they may relish in the crispness of something fried, be it shallots browned into savory sprinkles or bushels of watercress dipped in batter and frizzled into blooming flowers. These salads are generally dressed without oil, so lashings of lime juice, fish sauce, and blazing chile can sting you unencumbered. They’re lessons in exhilaration.
At Chao Thai, a cash-only restaurant in Elmhurst, the unofficial Thai Town of Queens, 62-year-old chef, owner, and daily Zumba practitioner Lisa Laksanayon has over a dozen salads on her menu. I’ve eaten and loved many of them, but it’s her yum takrai — lemongrass salad — that has exhilarated me for nearly 10 years. At times that exhilaration has felt more like obsession. Since my first trip to Chao Thai, I’ve lived in three apartments, each no more than a few subway stops from the restaurant. The thought of living farther from that salad, to not be able to drop everything I’m doing for an impromptu visit to eat it, makes me anxious. Queens has a way of sucking…
