Yes, No, Depends on the Question -- Arun's

I'm gonna give away a good key bit from my forthcoming and now past due report on last week's Joliet-athon. It was how, but for Chowhound/LTH, could one sit down in a restaurant AFTER a big meal, and do this: order (for six) 2 steak sandwiches, extra garlic butterine, and side of relishes. How many of us longed to do things like that for ages? DougK famously noted, it took finding our tribe. Which gets me to Arun's.

It was my birthday dinner, and I could essentially pick any spot, from the most humble and favored skinny hot dog at Gene and Judes to Rick and Gale's grand tasting collections at Tru. I chose Arun's. And I choose Arun's not that much on my longing for its version of Royal Thai (or what ever they consider their food), but I choose Arun's as fodder. JustJoan, the baker, warned me against going. I told her I wanted to go. I wanted to go to because I felt that someone who likes to proclaim all sorts of things about Chicago dining should have some understanding of the full range. Moreover, as someone who has specifically proclaimed on Thai dining, I felt I wanted a meal at Arun's for balance (just as I seek one day to go to Monsoon or Vermillion for comparison). Arun's was a birthday present to myself, something to write about. What an expensive folly.

The questions about Arun's stand twofold: is it worth the price and is it the most spectacular Thai food in Chicago. As one of my favorite blogs would say, sadly, no! With no irony, I can say, the only one bite was good (one bite salad). They served up food both astoundingly pedestrian and astoundingly mediocre. Nothing sums up our meal like a plate of not very good pad Thai. The kitchen entirely composes the meal, and what you get seems a bit of a crapshoot. For instance, they did not provide us oyster pancakes or crabcakes that other tables received, but were, of course, privy to the pad Thai. They do ask about spice preference, and we said very hot. They said Thai hot, and we said yes. A few of the dishes got exceedingly hot, Zim hot, from very ample use of Thai chile peppers, but in these cases, the balance in the dishes was so off, that it just hurt the mouth. To pile on, their method of serving the entrees family style resulted in dishes being cold by the time we got to them. And, sadly no, we did not leave wowed by the desserts. I would say that I had a very nice bottle of Sancerre, tasting like the best grapefruit juice imaginable. It highly complemented the meal, but then again I could bring my own Sancerre, for a fraction of the price, to Spoon or Thai Avenue, and get a good meal along side.

Here's the play by play:

Unlike anything else in its pricepoint (that I know of), Arun's does not open with an amuse, a little freebie to impress. Right down to business here. Right down to business with an especially un-impressive first course, a skewer of tempura vegetables, all neatly cut in matching squares, on top of a salad with a Thai fish cake. Both my wife and I went for the tempura first, thinking eat fried hot. Instantly, the greasy batter, hardly light tempura, put us off. I can tell you that the vegetables included Japanese sweet potato but I stopped eating the tempura too soon to remember all the other vegetables. The fish cake was OK, no better or no worse than any fish cake around town, with the same gummy texture that comes from working the fish to death before frying. With the fish cake, Arun's blew its first chance to step above the genre. Could not you see a skilled chef taking the idea of Thai fish cake and lightening it up, mixing in chunks of fish and otherwise keeping the dish true but in a way better? Under the fish cake was a salad of very fine greens and a few bits of Asian long beans, but the kitchen made a dressing essentially from the bottled chile sauce associated with Thai grilled chicken. This was not the first time during the evening that a bottled sauce would serve as the main condiment.

Next, we had pike fish, grilled with a heavy hand of salt and pepper alongside a small serving of sauted greens and bean sprouts, a few Thai chiles perking up the vegetables. In my many crusades of late, I seek more use of freshwater fish, so I should be happy here, but as the old joke goes, did you like it, no and the portions were small too. I thought the again too much grease marred, but the portion was too small to really appreciate the light flavor of the pike. They sauteed the baby-baby spinach well.

We followed with one bite, one bite salad. Here finally, Arun's justified if every, every so slightly, their higher price. The one bite salad, a mix of dried coconut, shrimp and stuff came on a real betel leaf unlike Spoon Thai's dish which comes on lettuce. The betel leaf numbs the mouth. It is cool to loose sensation in your mouth for about 60 seconds, but while the Condiment Queen had no quibble with this dish, I gotta say it missed some of the zing of Spoon's. Spoon uses bits of lime, and the lime peel included gives the dish a dose of bitterness that makes the dish so much more. Arun's was good.

I've already discussed the pad Thai.

After the pad Thai, we got another normal Thai dish, glass noodle salad. It got upscaled by a big shrimp, although we had just had a big shrimp on the pad Thai, so the gesture seemed meaningless. With this dish they really went to town with the chile peppers, but the dish lacked lime, sugar and fish sauce like most Thai salads. Therefore, the chiles just bombarded your tongue with no assistance. A really lousy dish.

Our final appetizer was a dumpling filled with more shrimp, a bit of chicken and a nut or two, like a piece of dim sum. I s'pose we were to be impressed by the tapioca pearl wrapper, but like I say, I've had better dim sum. Underneath the dumpling was a thin schmear of bottled chile sauce.

As I noted above, entrees come family style. Three plates looking very beautiful and a small bowl of rice. I believe these entrees were the exact same as what JeffB had when he reported about Arun's on Chowhound, which says something too, no?: red snapper with crisp seaweed and bottled sauce, chicken in a yellow curry and beef mussaman curry, and a lobster (and more) shrimp medley. The soft texture of the beef, advertised as tenderloin, but I believe flanken appealed and the quality of the lobster was high, but the dishes had just no substance. Like I said above, they were further marred by being cold after a while.

We got two desserts, the first mango with sticky rice, the second a small ball of coconut sorbet. Ms. VI believed that the mango/rice came with a sauce of melted lime sherbert. I just kept on commenting how it was so much less satisfying than the one I had a month or so ago at Thai Aree which benefited so much from the mysterious seeds.

The meal rather ends abruptly after those two small desserts. Anything else they ask, and then shoo you along. It is probably meaningless to say at this point that I was less than impressed with the service and the praised decor. Sure, they removed all the plates quickly and get you supplied always with fresh forks and knives, but the service also was a conveyor belt, just a bunch of younger kids (including someone I know from another Thai restaurant), rushing plates to and fro. There was little sense of being taken care of. There is a lot of pretty paintings, but the small side room where we found ourselves sitting felt like in the extra room where a few tables were unfolded when too many people showed up.

As we were leaving, I noticed a printed menu on the hostess's stand. I asked if we could have it. Well, we could not have that one we were told. It was for Charlie Trotter who was coming in with a few media friends, but they'd make us a copy. She also offered to e-mail me a copy which I accepted. But if I was mad about our nearly $300 meal (with wine) up until that point, well the idea of Trotter and the media soon swooning, well that just got me madder. And of course, I noticed, Charlie was not getting the pad Thai. Still, I'd rather take him to Spoon.

Arun's
4156 N. Kedzie Ave
Chicago, IL
(773) 539-1909