Lemongrass Thai Cuisine can be good – if you know what to order

It’s not unusual for a restaurant to serve a few dishes that aren’t on the menu. Charles d’Ablaing, for instance, tells me that if one of his Chaz on the Plaza diners requests a dish from a previous menu — even five menus back — and he has the ingredients in the kitchen, he’ll make it.

Letting people go “off menu” is a courtesy for regulars and the savvy — the kind of customers a restaurant wants. And in Asian restaurants, including a few around here, there’s often a separate menu, a discreet batch of dishes for those who want, say, xiao long bao rather than lo mein.

Which leads me to the “crazy noodles” I sampled last week at Lemongrass Thai Cuisine. That dish isn’t on the menu — and, according to the manager, may never be. Ask for it anyway because it’s among the best plates I tried at the month-old Overland Park restaurant. It’s made with rice noodles, flash-fried basil, red and green peppers, and a vibrant soy-based sauce with a hint of fiery chilies.

Order the crazy noodles but don’t get carried away with the feeling that you’re in on a quiet conspiracy. At Lemongrass, the dish is a secret only in the broadest sense; it has been a frequent dinner special since the place opened.

Lemongrass Thai Cuisine appears to be a traditional Thai restaurant at first glance, but its menu isn’t limited to popular Siamese dishes: curries, pad Thai, satays. Right now, it shows off nearly as many ethnic culinary influences as a casino buffet: several Chinese-American entrées on the dinner menu; a bowl of steaming Vietnamese pho; Indonesian fried rice; and that staple of 1960s Polynesian-style restaurants, Hawaiian fried rice tossed with cashews and pineapple chunks. What, no moo goo gai pan pizza?

What the place needs are a few more secrets, if they’re as good (that is, as authentic-leaning) as the crazy noodles. I asked manager Rath Nou why Lemongrass insists on making General Tso’s chicken or pepper steak when the kitchen can do better — and when the popular Dragon Inn remains practically around the corner.

“Chinese cooking has been an influence on Thai cuisine for centuries,” Nou says. “Dragon Inn has its specialties. We have ours. Our version of General Tso’s chicken is called General Tao’s chicken and has a very different sauce.”

Not different enough, especially given that nearly two dozen Thai restaurants around the metro serve comparable (and similarly indistinct) dishes.

Lemongrass’ indecisive culinary style might be a function of its newness — something also on display in the restaurant’s sometimes shaky service — but the place has potential.

On my first visit, I found that the starters were an indication of things to come: the good, the bad and the ugly. The fried calamari was dreadful (cold, chewy), and the marinated chopped pork ribs were gristly, boasting more fat than meat. But an order of deep-fried chicken wings, in a fragrant basil sauce, was excellent — a perfect blend of fire and sweet — as were the plump dumplings stuffed with ground pork.

One frigid night when I stopped by, a piping-hot bowl of tom kha kai left me feeling fine about winter again. The richly perfumed concoction — made with the grassy, sour lemony leaves that are this restaurant’s namesake, as well as peppery galangal root, kaffir-lime leaves and sweet coconut milk — was delicious, filling and altogether restorative.

The featured beef dish here — slices of flank steak delicately coated with rice flour and sautéed just long enough to brown the meat and give it an almost ethereal crunch — is simply called “House Beef.” It comes tossed with pieces of fresh asparagus, onions and mushrooms, and it’s as satisfying a meal as this place makes.

Another simply named meat dish, “House Pork,” is a variation on that crispy beef, and it, too, is memorably tasty. Shredded pork gets a dusting in water-chestnut flour before it’s flash-fried in spoon-size hunks and doused with a piquant wine sauce. Its sweetness veers close to candy, but I found myself not minding.

Sweet and crunchy aren’t necessarily virtues, however, in Lemongrass’ fried tilapia (called “pla laad priq katiem”). What I tasted had spent too many precious seconds in the deep fryer. It arrived as shiny as a lacquered grajabpi (Thai lute), colored a dark, tempting mahogany, but that gloss camouflaged a tough, tough piece of fish.

No better was the pad Thai I ordered. That noodle dish should be an easy mainstay for a Thai restaurant, but don’t judge Lemongrass by what I tried: a visually lifeless, disappointingly bland version of a staple.

A bowl of green curry, on the other hand, was perfection, hitting precise notes of sweetness, tartness and fire.

The Lemongrass dining room is a soothing and sophisticated room with curvy walls and black tile floors, a sleek makeover that banished all physical traces of the spectacularly dire venue that preceded Lemongrass (the combination restaurant, sushi bar and nightclub called Intentions). No more karaoke, in other words. Lemongrass Thai Cuisine is quiet and demure and all about the food.

But you can still hear a song echoing around the room sometimes, one with a nagging refrain: “We sold out of it at lunch.” That’s a line I heard several times from servers here. “We had a rush on sticky rice today,” a manager told me, explaining why a dessert — sweet rice in coconut milk with sliced fresh mangoes — was MIA. As it turned out, the wonton-wrapped fried banana and the cheesecake had vanished as well.

Their absence left me to order some chalky, tasteless ice cream. One scoop was said to be green tea and the other coconut, but I detected so little flavor that I would have believed I was eating vanilla or water-chestnut ice cream.

“Don’t you have a secret dessert?” I asked one of the servers.

“I could bring you a banana,” he said.