Review: Chan’s Thai Kitchen (♦♦)

In Thailand, it costs roughly the same for a used English paperback or enough street food to feed a family of 10. It’s a fantastic lesson in relative worth, especially for those able to appreciate a skewer of grilled frogs more than Dan Brown.

Such comparisons come to mind when evaluating Chan’s Thai Kitchen, which by any measure has been a local success story since opening in 1997. It’s nearly always packed and bad words about it are rare, other than long wait times to get a table and their stubborn refusal to do evening takeout. More than anything it’s proof Juneauites crave quality ethnic food (even if Chan’s quickly learned to tone down the spices), to the point where an average restaurant in the Outside world is a minor institution here.

Good as Chan’s is, there’s dingy hole-in-the-wall joints in Seattle some of us make beelines for, where the speed and price of our many cartons puts McDonald’s to shame. Sit-down places around the state and U.S. offer better high-end memories. As for competing with market stalls of Chiang Mai, well, nobody’s close to their bags of soup and noodle stir-frys that begin, not end, with pad thai. When you see guys in business suits going into the Sheraton for sterilized meals at 20 times the price, the urge to mock them openly is overwhelming (OK, they’re very lavish meals, but unless you’re the type who can appreciate a $100 kobe burger 20 times as much as a great $5 greasy spoon cheeseburger, there’s a seriously out-of-whack value thing going.)

But back to reality, also known as pretty much the only decent Thai food one can get in town, at least five days of the week. Chan’s is closed Sundays and Mondays, open for lunch (and takeout) and dinner Tuesdays through Fridays, and dinner only on Saturdays. A lunchtime trip to Auke Bay is too much effort for government work, assuming one works downtown, especially given Chan’s infamously slow service, which at least they’ve developed a sense of self-mockey about.

“Chan’s Thai Kitchen is absolutely the slowest restaurant in Juneau, probably in Alaska and possibly the United States,” a faux award certificate on the wall declares. Other signs mingling with the Asian art on the cheap wood panel walls warn “if you are in a hurry, it might be best to come back another time.” To their credit, the reason this happens is all their dishes are cooked fresh when ordered, which many of our cheap friends to the south can’t claim.

A line of people spilling outside the door is common since they’ve only got a couple of seats in the tiny waiting area. “We’ve done Chan’s only once and we’re probably done the ‘penalty lap’ ten times (in recent months),” one of our regulars said, describing the u-turn one makes in a pothole-filled parking lot when the crowd is more than one wants to endure. We’ve also had plenty of 45-minute delays where we passed time looking at the boats in the harbor across from the street. Unfortunately for Chan’s, that’s led to occasions where we’ve bought live crabs on impulse from returning fishermen — easily the best grade-A meal in this town if one knows how to boil water, and one that’s cheap to boot.

Speaking of cheap, Chan’s isn’t. Prices are getting close to double what quickie hole-in-the-wall favorites Down South charge. It’s the combination of slowness and price, along with a few not-universally-shared remarks about inconsistency, that bogs Chan’s down among the ordinary.

Which is too bad, because the food is good — sometimes damn good. The menu isn’t as long as the 43 items on it suggests, since many are merely different meats or tofu added to a base dish. But we have, over the years, probably eaten everything on the menu at least once and certain dishes seem to end up on the table a lot more than others.

The only drawback of the Tom Yom and chicken coconut soups (both $11.50) is they may set expectations too high for what’s to come. While the price might seem outrageous for soup — and shrimp is $1 more, as it is in all dishes — each is enough to be a meal or an appetizer for the table. The Tom Yom is spicy as advertised, but without overpowering the flavor of the lemon grass and lime leaves. The chicken coconut is milder and richer, with a pleasant spice bite that doesn’t burn. Both are loaded with chunky vegetables that are crispy and fresh, marred only by eating a few ginger slices mistaken for mushrooms, and various forms of protein that — like too many dishes — don’t add much enhancement because they’re a bit dry and overcooked. There’s two other soups with rice noodles and one with rice, but their seasonings aren’t interesting enough to keep them on our list of regular items.

The spring rolls ($11 for five, $7 for three) are middle of the road, crispy instead of greasy, but with nothing remarkable in the collage of flavors from the rice, chicken and vegetables. Then again, people at the table were complaining they were too hot to appreciate the flavor, while eating all of them anyhow before they had a chance to cool.

In American restaurants, one supposedly can get a good idea of overall quality by ordering that most generic of items — the chicken breast — and seeing what the kitchen is capable of when it comes to preparing and seasoning it. A pretty stupid idea, actually, especially for infrequent diners celebrating a special occasion at a place with more exotic choices. But it’s both more common and sensible at ethnic places like Chan’s, where something like pad thai ($13) is both a safe kids pleaser and a mellow counterpoint to sharper flavors from other dishes (if you’re with a group and everyone’s eating their own entree, get schooled in Food 101 as a prerequisite for reading the rest of this review). The pad thai at Chan’s is on the sweet side and tends to congeal into a giant starchy lump as it cools, suggesting it’s a bit dry on lubricants. Nonetheless, it’s addictive and seems to be part of the collective order any time more than two people are involved.

The chicken satay ($11) is another safe, regularly ordered dish registering on the sweet side. Chan’s peanut sauce is thick and savory, with only a hint of spiciness, and it’s a good match for the chicken and mound of cabbage it’s served with. It’s unfortunate the chicken is too dry and chewy almost every time we order it, but the flavor pairing is better than similarly cooked pork satay. A more complex and satisfying pairing of chicken and peanut sauce is the taa-po curry ($12.50), which adds tamarind juice, spinach and lime leaves. This combination, as with other curries, is also available with pork, beef or extra-cost shrimp, but the poultry option is most compatible.

The yellow curry ($12.50) is pleasantly mild and rich, with potatoes and onions replacing greener vegetables in other mixes, but we’ve seen these subtleties executed better elsewhere. The green curry ($12.50) has a good bit of zing to balance its inherent sweetness. A nice in-house special for those who enjoy spicy is the halibut option for the red curry ($13), where the smooth texture of the plain-flavored fish is an ideal match. Similarly the thin strips of beef — generally the most tender and well-cooked of the proteins — are a good match with the peanuts (but no vegetables) in the spicy panang beef ($13).

The basil chicken ($12) and its pork, beef and tofu incarnations are a solid option, stir fried with a hefty pile of peppers, bamboo shoots and zucchini. Same for the broccoli pork with basil ($12), which adds…do we really need to explain this? A (protein of choice) with young ginger ($11.50) is equally well done, but of more limited appeal, with mushrooms and those similar-looking ginger slices replacing the basil and peppers.

A few of the dishes that seem to have fallen off the radar, at least until we revisited them for this review: the vegetarian hed pat woonsen ($12.50), thin rice noodles sir fried with vegetables and egg, is a bit like Chinese lo mein - a lot of starch without many strong flavors. The garlic shrimp with cabbage ($12) sounds better than it’s executed, with the garlic flavor surprisingly light for the number of cloves involved, not enough shrimp and too much sodden overcooked cabbage. And while the pad see iew ($13), rice noodles stir fried in black bean sauce, gets ordered from time to time when we’re looking for a break from pad thai, it never seems to generate much excitement.

Something else none of has ordered in a while are the Thai coffee and iced tea ($2.25), a common indulgence at other places, but here the calories from all that coconut milk and sugar don’t seem to come together well enough to justify them. We didn’t order one during our recent visits, so all we’re left with here are memories of something that for some reason or another was missing the intangibles.

Our writer-of-the-week sent out the usual e-mail after our visit, asking for ratings and impressions, and maybe the most interesting one was one that gave Chan’s a high rating, but nearly every comment was critical: “The soups are always good, the food is consistent, and good and hearty, but won’t knock me off my feet. The attitude is poor, and that no takeout at dinner is a major bummer. Someday another Thai restaurant is going to show up and they’ll start having to treat their customers like customers.” Like a sturdy home on a solid foundation, Chan’s worth as a long-term haven can’t be questioned, but there’s so many little chinks in the decor one wonders why they can’t do a little touch-up. The answer, of course, is as long as lines are spilling out the door, there’s no reason they need to.