Jason S.
Yelp
With the demise of Yummy Yummy Tasty Thai a few years ago, authentic Thai in the Denver region has been lamentably rare. There are plenty of good westernized Thai places to choose from, but sometimes you want the real stuff with its brash flavors and immediacy. Star Thai fits that bill.
Stuck in a sad strip mall in a sad part of Lakewood, we stumbled onto Star Thai accidentally (hurray Yelp mobile!) and on entering, were not encouraged. Several tables were covered in stacks of uncleared dishes, the dining room was redolent of kitchen smoke (I HATE kitchen smoke), and the host/server looked at little frenzied. But something about this sketchy little place says "the food is what matters" and before I had time for second thoughts, a table was cleared and we were invited to sit.
Our server was quick to get our order started--some jasmine tea for my wife, some Thai iced tea for me, and a couple bowls of tom yum with shrimp. These came out rather quickly. The teas were good, the soups, excellent: spicy, fragrant, devilishly spicy, with shrimp that were tender and fresh.
Several more parties came in while we ate our starters, and our server got more busy, shuffling uncleared dishes around and delivering and taking orders. so it took a while to get our entree orders in. Long enough that I had the opportunity to wonder if they couldn't afford another set of hands. But eventually we ordered our dishes: beef salad, pad Thai, and a Star Thai salad.
Through the curtains that separate the kitchen from the dining room, we could just glimpse a woman working furiously but expertly in back, big flames billowing from her wok and the sound of food being dropped into hot oil. Good signs. Our server also acted as kitchen assistant, prepping side dishes and salads in back. Pretty soon, our beef salad arrived and damn was it good. Straight from the wok and onto a plate with a nice helping of crisp romain leaves, it was tender, smoky, with a nice, slow burn--and yet not at all heavy.
Next came our pad Thai. Pad Thai in lots of restaurants has become a bit caricatured and bereft of complexity--it's the "easy" dish for wary eaters and has, consequently, been inbred to look safe and to taste familiar. But that makes it a good "calibration" dish to order because what you get tells you something important about the kitchen. At Star Thai, the kitchen isn't making concessions to American palates: the pad Thai is spicy, gooey, smoky, complex, and not especially pretty to look at--which describes many great things. And again, the shrimp were noticeably tender and fresh.
Our last dish, the Star Thai salad, was essentially a pile of vegetables otherwise destined for the wok, served with a tamarind-peanut dressing otherwise destined for fresh spring rolls. Surprisingly, this slight of hand worked, though we probably won't go back if we have a hankering for salad.
The ambiance is non-existent, no two plates match, they don't serve alcohol, and the service is friendly though a little spotty, but the place is so honest and the food is so good how could you not love it?
