Dining Out:
At Mayo Thai Kitchen, you'll enjoy every bite

By TOM & JULIE MALLONEE, For The Capital

The Mayo Thai Kitchen greets you with a burst of color.

Outside, electric blue and fuchsia trim is softened with walls of cool pastel. Inside, the bright theme continues, with the added exuberance of woven gold brocade panels atop colorful linen tablecloths.

The dining room is small, 10 tables tops, augmented by a short lunch-carryout counter in an adjoining room (reservations would be a good idea on weekends). But the food is worthy of a far larger and more sophisticated establishment. Quality is first rate, the presentations are lovely. And prices are a bargain.Portions are more than generous, so think sharing - especially if you're contemplating several courses. On the other hand, you could go whole hog and ask for take-home boxes to enjoy yourself twice over.

Our opening appetizer perfectly exemplified this bountifulness. A combo plate ($10) almost bridged the entire list, delivering a pair of spring rolls, three fried veggie dumplings, a duo of shrimp rolls, two skewers of grilled chicken satay and, finally, kanomjeeb, a pair of steamed dumpling filled with ground pork and shrimp. Four dipping sauces accompanied all this goodness.

And good everything was. Fried treats were crisp and savory, without a hint of greasiness. Steamed dumplings were light and tender, the satay smokey and moist. Sauces included a sweet duck sauce, a light vinegar-sugar cucumber sauce, a slightly spicy homemade peanut sauce and black bean sauce. Half the fun was figuring out which sauce went best with which appetizer.Tom Yom Kong ($4) was your classic lemon grass soup, enhanced with two really big shrimp.

The shrimp were tender, the full bodied, homemade broth bright with lively lemony flavors. Cautionary note: Don't try to eat the hard pieces of dried lemon grass (as we did), they're there for flavor only. The same soup can be had with chicken instead of shrimp for 50 cents less.Thai cuisine being a little foreign to us (yes, that's a joke, son), we relied on our host cum server cum occasional chef to guide us to the more traditional dishes. He did a good job, so if you're a novice too, we recommend the same.Pad Thai is one of the classics, thin rice noodles stir fried with chicken ($9) or shrimp ($10) plus bean sprouts, egg, scallions and crushed peanuts.

The noodles were firm but tender, our four huge shrimp were perfect, and the slightly sweet sauce complimented them all. The presentation included a garnishing tomato rose and a carved radish (oddly suggestive of a soccer ball).We're fond of curry, so Panang ($9), another traditional dish with a curried peanut sauce, was well received. It came with a choice of chicken, beef or pork. Our chicken was tender, all white meat cut into slender pieces. Bright green broccoli and sweet red pepper slices added both color and our dietary veggies from the food pyramid.Vegetarians can have a field day here.

There's almost a whole page of meatless dishes offering noodles, tofu, eggplant, bamboo shoots, etc., in various sauces. As with the rest of the menu, all can be had in various stages of spicieness according to your taste. The menu adorns each with little chili peppers to indicated the traditional heat. As an added note, no MSG is used in Thai cookery.

The restaurant is waiting on their liquor license, so neither wine, beer or hard liquor is served at this time. However, a very interesting and tasty iced green tea, imported from Thailand, is available to go with your food. And, of course, there's the usual run of hot tea, coffee and soft drinks.

The menu lists four desserts, but only two were available this evening, so we had one of each.A crispy fried banana ($3) was wrapped in paper-thin, crunchy pastry and served hot with a generous scoop of good vanilla ice cream.Mango with sticky rice ($4) included half a peeled and sliced ripe mango with a rectangle of the honey sweetened rice alongside. It made for very nice contrasts in textures and flavors.

All this exotic food was accompanied with rather the incongruous background music of light jazz and vocals from the '40s and '50s. They may not be Southeast Asian, but Peggy Lee and Rosemary Clooney go great with any cuisine.The Mayo Thai Kitchen is turning out a lot of first-class food at amazingly low prices. As we suggested earlier, the staff is small but friendly and more than willing. We enjoyed every bite.

By the way, don't expect chop sticks; the Thais are a knife-and-fork people.