Vegas Victuals

Adam, Missy and I putt-putted to a low-slung, square-shaped shopping complex off the famed Strip between the casino clusters and downtown Las Vegas. Our destination was Lotus of Siam, which has been heralded by The Los Angeles Times, Gourmet and other publications as one of the best--if not the greatest--Thai restaurants in the U.S. Little did we know when Adam steered his bright blue convertible into the parking lot that we had arrived in the epicenter of postmodern multiculti life in Nevada. Lotus Siam was neighbor to a Japanese restaurant called Tokyo, a Mexican restaurant, a wig store owned by someone named Serge, an Indian establishment, a dive bar called Miss Mr. and a Korean BBQ joint that had a neon sign flashing words in Korean and the romanized phrase "U Dong." As Adam was chilling with his two Southeast Asian co-workers, I thought we should order a whole catfish fried with the head and tail intact and topped with chili flakes, Thai basil and red and green peppers. My nimble Viet fingers deftly removed the pleated meat off the skeleton. The fish complemented the flavors and texture of the other dishes, which started with a medium-spicy larb salad of cabbage and minced chicken sauteed with chili flakes. We asked for medium-spicy but the salad arrived super-spicy. Even Missy's Filipina tongue and my Viet genes couldn't handle the spiciness. I had to swish some of my sweetened lemongrass drink around in my mouth to cool off. The three of us joked that the waiter noticed how much water we were drinking to placate our palate from the overload of chilis and told the kitchen to disregard our requests for all the dishes to be medium-spicy and give us the mild treatment instead. The red curry with beef was calming in comparison to the larb salad. The jumbo shrimp, which were removed from most of their shells but remained attached to the tails, twisted into crunchy amorphous blobs in the hot frying oil. After I brought my temperature down to normal, I was able to enunciate to Missy and Adam that Lotus of Siam cooked the best Thai food I ever had in the U.S.

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