Anyway, we’re back, recharged. This week we explored a restaurant in a location and featuring a cuisine that are both new to this site. B is now working in Eden Prairie (a travail for a city snob) and so our lunches for the next few months are likely to be somewhere in between downtown Minneapolis and some developer’s idea of paradise.

Both B and I are very partial to Thai food, and have the status of dinner regulars at Royal Orchid, my hands-down favorite Thai restaurant in the Twin Cities—and frankly I haven’t encountered more flavorful Thai food anywhere else in the country either. But Royal Orchid is a little out of the way for lunch, and our venue this week was Ketsana’s, a small, unprepossessing white box of a restaurant near Lyndale and I-494. The place used to be a burger joint until a couple of years ago, and the diner look and feel was probably more appropriate then. But it’s clean and comfortable and the owners make no pretense of providing an elegant or immersive Thai experience. In the lingo of our scorecard, Ketsana’s is about Food, not Etc.

The restaurant boasts a huge menu, a total of over 70 dishes with most of them available in several variations depending on the main ingredient of preference (chicken, pork, beef, shrimp, tofu, etc.). Curries, stir fries, noodle dishes, and there’s even phô.

B and I split the fresh spring rolls to start. They were enormous, at least twice the volume of what you’d find in most other places, but good. The filling had nicely balanced amounts of rice noodle, pork, shrimp, and cilantro. The roast pork had a distinctive and unusual peppery bite.

For my main dish, I went with the roast duck curry based on past experience. It’s highly recommended here; the duck is moist and a plentiful in a rich, basil-infused coconut milk sauce. The dish contains a small amount of peas that provide a contrast of color and texture. B ordered a variant, the beef curry. This was also quite good if not superlative.

We both asked for sticky rice to go with our curries. This was delivered in small wicker baskets but came well after the curries had been brought to our table with regular white rice. The service in general was poor. Our waitress gave an impression not so much of incompetence as of disinterest—a worse failing in my view.

To drink, we both had Thai iced coffees. These were overly sweet. The specials board listed two items, both desserts—custard with sticky and black sticky rice—and if my coffee hadn’t been as sweet as it was I might have tried one. Beer is also available, both domestic and Singha.

As a closing reminder that Ketsana’s isn’t a purist Thai place, our bill came with fortune cookies. Mine said, "You will travel to many places." Having returned two days previously from a trip to Bulgaria and with a trip to France coming up in a couple of weeks—a brief travel spurt in what have otherwise been quiet times—I thought this a little uncanny. Or perhaps it’s just fate’s way of telling us that The Lunch is back as a regular event!

As a rule I am a great fan of Thai cooking. This fondness goes back many years when I was in Bangkok for the first time. Eating green curry dishes washed down with plenty of Singha beer in an exotic foreign city is enough to make anyone a fan. Couple that with being mugged and almost drowning and you have memories for a lifetime. The Lunch this week goes to Ketsana’s, a Thai restaurant located in Richfield. You may well wonder what took A & B so far afield from their normal hunting grounds – as usual it’s where my current project happens to be.

I could never imagine a Thai restaurant setup as a railroad car until happening upon Ketsana’s. Try and visualize an L shaped railroad diner and you have a pretty good picture. The seating is red plastic-velour with very ordinary tables. There is no pretence to the diner being transported to some oriental setting; indeed one gets the impression of a burger joint hastily vacated. I didn’t like the first table I was shown and asked to be reseated; this caused our waitress extreme distress and the service after that went downhill. In general the standard of service at Thai restaurants in the Twin Cities varies from the nonexistent to the extremely inept and the reason for this is the hiring of family members instead of professional wait staff. For instance at the Taste of Thailand the service is so bad that I no longer dine there, instead I call ahead for a takeaway. At Ketsana’s our waitress didn’t offer us any water nor did she ask if we wanted anything to drink. We were made to wait for quite a while before our orders were taken.

The menu is extensive. It lists thirteen appetizers, although repeating the same item with a varying single ingredient makes up the number. They include spring rolls, egg rolls, soups, etc.. The same technique is used for the entrees where the meat is interchangeable between chicken, beef and shrimp (duck is also available for a few of the dishes). The dishes range from traditional green curries to stir-fries. For starters I shared an order of spring rolls with A. There were only two rolls but they were huge, nicely filled with vegetables and bits of pork; the pork was tasty and flavorful. As my main dish I had the beef curry with white rice. A had the duck based counterpart of this dish. My dish was good but I think A’s might have been better. The beef came served with bamboo and sautéed in coconut milk. We had also ordered sticky rice as a side but that came much later on, after we were almost done with our meals and remained unconsumed – a victim of us having asked for a different table! With our meals we each had a cup of Thai coffee (a sweetened ice coffee).

Overall experience was poor. The food was marginally good; the service atrocious with poor ambiance. Your Thai dining dollars would be better spent at The Royal Orchid in Roseville or even at The Taste of Thailand in St. Paul. (In the case of the latter order by phone and have it ready to go when you get there.) The bill came to about $25.00.

B