BTO: Tried and true wins the day at new Thai openings

Business Times – 04 Dec 2004

Tried and true wins the day at new Thai openings

By Jaime Ee

Sticky etiquette question of the week: If you are in a Thai restaurant in Singapore, and the staff - mostly non-Thai - greet you with the traditional 'sawasdee' hands-clasped-and-bow-of-head gesture, how do you respond? Do the same and feel silly in a me-Singaporean-you-not-Thai so-why-must-pretend-like-that manner, or avoid them by pretending your contact lens fell out and grope your way across the floor to your table?

This social dilemma confronted me at two new Thai restaurants in town, where I was sawasdee-d more times in five minutes than I am in five days in Bangkok. I decided the best way to avoid returning the greeting was to startle them by demanding, 'where's your dessert buffet?' whereupon they would get so flustered they would forget to bow their heads.  

The two new restaurants are named Sabai and Rung Rueng - both high-end Thai eateries that come with a certain pedigree.

Sabai
#04-23 Ngee Ann City. Tel: 6333 8492
Rating: 6.5/10

Sabai is actually the old Thanying given a new name but run by the same people behind the original restaurant at Amara Hotel. Having swopped dated premises for spanking new upmarket digs at Ngee Ann
City, Sabai is dressed in starched linens and priced to match.

It wasn't cheap to eat at Thanying in its old place, and the new prices you're paying are definitely in line with its higher rent. But if you remind yourself that this is royal Thai cuisine, you will stop doing calculations to see if you can squeeze a budget air ticket to Bangkok and a meal at Bangkok's own Thanying for the price of a meal here.

For starters, we were a trifle disappointed that mien kam - the Thai complimentary snack of diced dried shrimp, coconut, peanuts and other condiments wrapped in a muang leaf and dipped in a sweet sauce - was not available that day. Instead, we got slices of sour green mango to be dipped in a sweet spicy sauce - which wasn't so fun to eat.

Sabai's menu features everything in the old Thanying menu, and lots more. But if you don't want any surprises, then stick to the tried and tested. We would never fail to order its deep fried grouper with
sweet/spicy sauce, stuffed chicken wings, papaya salad and tom yam soup. But opting for the new dishes, we had hit and miss results.

The bittergourd salad ($15) sounded intriguing and was a refreshing concoction of paper thin slices of gourd mixed with chicken and prawn bits in a tart lime-chilli dressing adorned with two whole prawns. A
few bites later, though, and the tartness became a little overpowering. Something was a bit off in the sweet-sour-salty-spicy combination the day we were there, possibly attributable to opening jitters - even
so, for veterans in the business, you wonder what jitters they could possibly have. For some reason, there was a sense of coyness or hesitance in the food that we couldn't quite put a finger on.

An attempt to create Thai dimsum remained just that - an attempt. The intriguingly described but non-descript sago balls stuffed with either minced chicken and peanuts or minced fish basically confirms
why dimsum is best left to the Cantonese.  

The Chiangmai sausage, or Sai Ouah ($12.50) is a worthy opponent to its counterpart back home - this exciting combination of minced meat and herbs brought back instant memories of hunting down the best sai ouah in the northern Thai region. Soups like tom yam and fish maw were solid - no surprises here, although the tom yam was slightly watered down. And if you're really not into spicy Thai - Sabai does a lovely steamed cod ($28) fragrant with fish sauce, lime juice and herbs, and you have the option of ladling a yummy chilli dressing on the fish which is garlicky good.

If you want to reprise your Thanying memories of old, stick to the classic dishes. Finally, if you've had sneaky suspicions that Thanying's famous dessert buffet has been getting smaller and smaller, your
fears are confirmed here as $7.50 gets you little more than fruit, a small selection of Thai sticky cakes, its famous candied tapioca with coconut cream, a warm bubur cha cha like dessert and attap seeds. Gone are the days of platters overflowing with Thai fruit and groaning plates of jellies and assorted icy concoctions.

As they say, nostalgia comes at a price, and it's up to you to decide if Sabai is worth it. 

Rung Rueng
#01-05 One Fullerton. Tel: 6423-1063.
Rating: 7/10

At Rung Rueng, the Thai sister to Tatsuya Sushi, prices are similar to Sabai, but you do get an opening discount of 15 per cent thanks to hastily printed vouchers shoved at you when you're walking through One Fullerton.

The food there is consistently good, and so is the service - despite the countless sawasdee greetings.

The green mango salad ($14) is a deliciously sweet and crunchy mound of shredded mango and crispy dried shrimp in a creamy coconut dressing, while the stuffed chicken wings are just like Thanying's - crispy skin with generous stuffing of minced meat and prawn.

Check out too the deep fried king prawns ($24) featuring four giant specimens deep-fried in crispy batter (they must have got tips from Tatsuya's tempura chef for this) such that you can even crunch down on the whole prawn head without having to retrieve bits of shell from between your teeth. They are generous with their dips, filling the table with a different combination for almost every dish. Also good and
garlicky (extremely) is the stir-fried sliced pork. And it also serves a good rich green curry.

But don't go peering all over the restaurant to look for the dessert buffet that's listed in the menu. It's been taken off the menu. Maybe they assume that people will just go for the widely acclaimed sticky rice with durian, or mango. If you're less ambitious, the simple water chestnut and coconut flesh in iced coconut milk ends the meal on a predictable note. Which is what this restaurant is in terms of menu - you get no surprises, but you do get what you expect. Overall, if you're a fan of Aroy Thai's East Coast branch, you'll appreciate Rung Rueng for its finer touches and - given its all-woman kitchen team - feminine approach to Thai cuisine.