Pretty hot and tasty

That was a very cool acronym about 20 years ago–PHAT, pretty hot and tasty. Leave it to me to be cool, just 20 years too late.

PHAT also describes dinner at Lemon Grass Bistro in Martinez, where we ate tonight with Jan and Keith Gunn. Right on the revitalized Main Street, with outdoor dining available where the city has taken out parking spaces to Europeanize the area.

Lemon Grass is decorated with a great collection of art–it’s one of the nicer looking places we’ve been.

This is a very nicely decorated eatery.The art is local.

The menu is varied, with Thai and Indian dishes. In an italian place I’ll always have the caprese, in a Thai restaurant you can count on the green papaya salad coming my way.

Green papaya salad with shrimp.

I enjoyed the salad, but wish it had more shredded goodness and less lettuce.

We ordered a variety of dishes to share–seafood combo, garlic fried rice, red curry pork and some spaghetti/shrimp dish. They were all good, all spicy, all cooked to perfection. This is part of my effort not to always order the same thing–I like Pad Thai and Yellow Curry anything, but need to expand my tastes.

I like this restaurant; they put out an excellent Thai iced tea. Service was as good as you can expect in a local, mid-price ethnic joint. Even the bus boy was first rate, carefully sorting and packing the leftovers so we each could take what we wanted.

I think about a third of all Thai restaurants are named Lemon Grass. Another third are called Basil Leaf. The cuisine is inventive, why are the names so un-creative?

Martinez isn’t the first place you think of for a night out, yet Main Street has undergone a bit of a renovation, and Lemon Grass Bistro is decidedly a good choice when you are in the mood for Thai. Give it a shot.