Siam Ease

My mother grew up in a small Midwestern city along Highway 40 — the old National Road — and during her childhood in the 1940s, going out for dinner was a big deal only if they were driving to the next larger city. After all, in her town, the choices were slim: a couple of cheap cafés, a steakhouse and a family-owned cafeteria that specialized in greasy fried chicken and soggy pies. The only thing that might have been called ethnic food was the spaghetti and meatballs served in a smoky “Eye-talian” joint.

Few of those places are left. Most have been replaced by chain operations like Applebee’s, now considered by the residents there to be the very zenith of culinary sophistication.

I hated visiting the gray and ugly town as a kid. We usually returned only for funerals or to bid a teary farewell to some wizened relative in the nursing home. Once that grim obligation was done, my mother would toss her damp hankie into her purse and announce cheerily, “Let’s eat!” As a treat, we got a second dose of misery — the gastronomic variety — chewing overcooked vegetables and gristly beef at one of the hamlet’s dingy restaurants. It was straight out of Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street: “Savorless people, gulping tasteless food and sitting afterward … listening to mechanical music.”

Lewis published Main Street in 1920, several years before he came to Kansas City to do research for his novel Elmer Gantry. Kansas City was Big Stuff in the mid-1920s, with streetcars, fancy hotels and movie palaces. But over on the Kansas side of the state line, a small town was being created out of little more than a good idea. Originally called Mission Hills Acres, the 160 acres once owned by a Shawnee tribesman named John Prophet was subdivided into 245 building sites by the heirs of Louis Breyfogle, the third owner of the property. The town didn’t become Mission until 1938, when the fledgling city already had its own post office, grocery store, barbershop, hardware store and drugstore.

Mission — more than any of the other twenty cities that make up Johnson County, Kansas — still feels like a small town, but one with more vitality and charm than the dullsville setting of Sinclair’s Main Street. Mission is considered a “bedroom community” (the population is only about 10,000 and covers an area of 2.75 miles), but that gives the tiny borough some sex appeal. And unlike some of its hoity-toity neighbors, Mission still has a movie theater, saloons, interesting little shops and accessible parking. It also has a couple of Johnson County’s older restaurants — the 35-year-old Village Inn and the 33-year-old Don Chilito’s.

Only slightly younger is Thai Orchid, one of the friendliest restaurants in Mission, where servers cluck over the customers like doting (and sometimes dotty) relatives. Last month, the Thai Orchid celebrated its 15th anniversary, though I didn’t notice any champagne corks popping during any of my three visits. Maybe that’s because the place doesn’t stock the bubbly stuff in the Tiki-style bar tucked into a back corner of the restaurant. (There is wine, however — the kind that comes in cardboard boxes.) And although my friend Carol spied a few bottles of liquor on the shelves of the Tiki hut, she discovered that getting a cocktail was impossible.

“Could I get a Cosmopolitan?” she asked our server. He looked back at her blankly, as if she had asked him for a 1957 Plymouth Fury with leather upholstery. “We don’t, we can’t … ,” he stuttered, pulling away from our table. Our dining companions, Kate and Pat, noted his confusion and worried that Cosmopolitan might have been the Thai expression for bring me your penis on a tray. They ordered wine instead.

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Kate, like many flower children of the 1960s, is a vegetarian. So that we could share an appetizer, I ordered something called a Taro Nest, which turned out to be a mound of slightly chewy sticks of deep-fried taro root. I ate more of them than Kate did, dipping the sticks in the same plum sauce I used to dress a crispy spring roll stuffed with ground chicken and pork. We also ordered a chewy fish pancake, Tod Mun Pla, another fried delicacy that didn’t score points for visuals or taste.

Still, Carol, the interior designer, gave the restaurant high visual marks for its “simple, clean and pretty” décor, including a partition running through the middle of the dining room like a planter arranged with dozens of upright silk orchids all in the same shade of sexy pink.

As the server scurried out with different dinner plates for us, Kate revealed a family secret: She had an aunt living in Detroit, Sister Kathleen, who had been Madonna’s fourth-grade teacher! Six degrees of separation! That confession wasn’t nearly as thrilling as the Orchid Seafood that Carol ordered, which arrived in a puffed-up aluminum-foil bag, erupting with steam like the old stovetop Jiffy Pop popcorn pans. Our waiter carefully trimmed back the foil so that it resembled a metallic basket, and we all peeked in to see the generous assortment of plump scallops, pink shrimp and ivory-colored squid floating in a ginger-scented broth with vegetables and amber-colored cellophane noodles.

That night’s dinner special was duck, prepared panaeng-style in a red-curry and coconut-milk sauce, a rich and lovely stew spooned over white rice. Kate ordered a meatless variation on the theme, kaeng pak, and Pat ordered a dish of hot and spicy shrimp, breaded and fried and puffed up like dumplings.

All of the dishes we chose were either fiery or sweet, incorporating the prominent flavors of the palate — sweet, bitter, salty, sour and pungent — that make up the “balanced flavors” believed to be perfect for the senses by Thai and Chinese cooks. The desserts were strictly sweet, though the textures were interesting. No coconut ice cream here, but traditional Thai custards and pastries, like a square of warm, tan-colored coconut “cake” that looked as unassuming as a health-food power bar but tasted like a hot macaroon. The pumpkin custard was light and silken in texture but didn’t have the earthy flavor we expected. “And it’s not orange,” noted Carol, sounding exactly like a fourth-grade teacher.

A few nights later, I returned with Gail, who pointed out some of the interior’s less enchanting qualities. “It has a drop ceiling,” she said. “And the brown carpeting is hideous.”

Gail did approve of the steamed dumplings, though, when the server dropped a plate of them in front of us, balls of seasoned pork and shrimp practically bursting out of wonton skins. After cross-examining the waiter about the chili sauce that accompanied the dish (“Just how hot is hot?” she demanded), she timidly tasted the pumpkin-colored condiment.

“Oh, it’s wonderful,” she said brightly. “Sort of a kindly hot sauce, not the tongue-searing kind. And such a lovely color.”

I had never considered using the word kindly to describe a food product before, but that night I did suspect that my dish of sliced beef in red curry paste and coconut milk was well-intentioned. And Gail’s dinner of succulent scallops sautéed with scallions, peppers and chili paste bordered on being friendly. With so much good feeling surrounding us, Gail lost her mind and ordered fried ice cream for dessert, possibly because she didn’t have a clue what the server was talking about when he explained what it was. More likely she felt the dessert would be somewhat sweeter than kindly. Maybe benevolent?

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Alas, I didn’t feel kindly about the lukewarm confection that arrived. It wasn’t fried. It was barely defrosted. Gail liked the thick breading around the ball of vanilla ice cream (“It’s like apple pie without the apples”), but I thought the dessert was an icky mess.

My spirits improved dramatically when the check arrived. Dinners at the Thai Orchid are so reasonably priced that you can forgive the little annoyances — the drop ceilings and fried ice cream. I didn’t even mind the screaming infant at the next table or, more horrifying, the intellectuals sitting behind us loudly arguing about Tolkien.

“And isn’t it interesting,” asked Gail as we walked out of the restaurant, “that they give you Tootsie Rolls instead of mints after you pay your check? It’s so … American!”