Tons of T's

Surprisingly, another (relatively) new place in < a week! When a colleague recently wanted “Asian food”, we decided to traipse over to Taste of the Far East (a place that we liked previously). On getting there, we found that it was now a Thai restaurant called Thai Top Ten (-1 for a name like that :)… although it abbreviates nicely to T3). Situated a couple of doors up from Ipanema, one would be hard pressed to notice any change in the décor from its previous incarnation.
Bad pun-ditry apologia on the subject of Thai restaurant names: there are groan-worthy names like Thaitanic and Thaiphoon. And for the physician to heal Thaiself there may be Thai roid and Thaimus :)).

T3 was pretty good. They have several (way more than 10) dishes with a pretty list of the usual Thai "pad" suspects, noodles and curries. Every entrée comes in choices of chicken, beef, pork, tofu or mock duck (some have scallops as options as well) which makes for a host of permutations. The latter two in addition to a whole host of noodles make T3 good for vegetarians. Portions sizes were pretty generous with each lunch entrée coming with a spring roll…(~$10 pp w/t&t)
Given my low threshold for heat, I felt like I was just at the cusp of my limit with the medium (mild is the lower setting on the dial) and I probably couldn’t have managed either of the next two levels – American hot and Thai hot.
Elephant Thai has some serious competition now in the neighborhood.

Ah…..so many T3 or 3T tangents come to mind – 3T3 fibroblasts, T3 topological spaces, T3 DNA ligase, 3 thymine linkers…..(all of which may explain why I am not and have no desire to be a food “critic” of any sort !)…..

On the Ts….somehow the previous post transmogrified into a rather interesting discussion on small plates and meal construction (raising complex issues beyond the scope of this blog). I blame my sub-optimal writing skills that it wasn’t evident that I actually love the concept of small plates.
While San Sebastian will have to wait, this episode reminded me of a “small plate experience” 100 miles to the north, that was highly enjoyable this summer. In honor of one of my favorite chefs – Jose Andres, we found that a perfectly good half day of eating and drinking well, could be spent by going on a JA tapas crawl. From antojitos (Mexican) at Oyamel to good ol’ Spanish tapas at Jaleo to Mediterranean (Turkish, greek and Lebanese) mezze/tapas at Zaytinya, this tasting trio covers three of JA's gems in a short section of the Penn Quarter.. JA’s clever melding of ingredients and nod to the traditional is a joy to behold – from the devilishly simple pan con tomate to complex kreatika, each and any of the 3 offer tapas, cheeses and meats to satisfy pretty much any taste. Toss in nice (regional) wine lists and cocktails at all three places and this is time well spent, in every sense.
Interestingly….if one could fly, O, J and Z are almost perfectly linear (see map) - although as an NP-hard traveling salesman problem, its best to try and end up in Jaleo for dessert.
Now, if I could fly…..