If I wrote or sounded like my little sister, who is twelve-going-on-thirteen and loves Doctor Who and Tumblr, this is what I would write about Sri Nuan:
ERMAHGERD OM NOM NOM.
She literally typed that herself. If only she’d had the good fortune of eating there with us, she could’ve enjoyed bounties of cooked-to-order seafood, curries, and delicious young coconuts ’til the cows came home.
We went for lunch on a Monday and we went back for dinner the next day. Although the pick-your-seafood bonanza was only available during dinner, we still snuck in a fried fish with garlic, vermicelli spring rolls, crispy pork green curry (with coconut rice), and a coconut smoothie (inside a coconut).
I stole a peek into their cozy kitchen as well:
But dinner the next day was the highlight. Just look at all the ocean-fresh seafood we had to choose from. It was like picking baby names. We couldn’t possibly go wrong! (Editor’s note: there are many, many wrong baby names.)
(Another editor’s note: but all the seafood looked delicious).
We pointed and nodded at one beautiful crab and asked for it be chopped up and stir-fried with fried garlic and pepper. Then we pointed and nodded at something else – a bunch of clams (to be cooked up in Thai chili). In addition, we also ordered a Chinese broccoli with crispy pork (coincidentally, great baby name), a chicken red curry, another vegetable no-name, and another coconut rice. And then we prayed for forgiveness.
Forgive us.
The vegetable no-name wasn’t quite as good as Mumthong’s version (more mayonnaise-y for some reason, but I suppose with a name like that, it’s creative license to do whatever the kitchen feels like). Other than that, everything was face-spankingly scrumptious. Fried garlic and pepper never fail, especially with crab. Sometimes, with steamed crustaceans, you work hard for a bite of sweet, succulent meat, but with so little upfront payment, it’s easy to get bored. But when you douse the outside with flavor (fried garlic, in particular), you get a prolonged sensation of awesome that begins even before you hit the crab meat lottery. The clams came in a small pool of thick, tangy chili sauce and deeply aromatic basil. When paired with the crunchy, slightly bitter gailan, crispy pork was even more a star (as it should be) and less overshadowed by stronger flavors, as was the case in its lunch-time curry form.
We had the audacity to order dessert. A plate of sticky rice (flooded with coconut milk) and mango, and a hot bowl of banana in coconut milk. The coconut sticky rice was reliably delightful, and the coconut-banana combo was the first I’d tasted (apparently a Southern Thai favorite). For me, the latter would’ve been perfect if tweaked a little – I found it a bit cloying (much like a drenched bowl of candied yams), but the texture (a soggy, coconut milk-soaked outside, and a slightly firm bite of banana), and temperature (the heat matches the intensity of the sweetness) worked well together.
Sri Nuan
Had Lamai, Lamai, Koh Samui
(A few blocks south of McDonald’s)
House of Hao's 