Here's a little rule of thumb I hatched while visiting Otho Restaurant & Street Lounge: If the dish includes pork, order it.
A visit to this new pan-Asian restaurant practically requires diving into chef Otho Phanthavong's fantastic open-faced dumplings, the mellow pork ramped up with copious amounts of ginger and slightly crunchy bits of bread crumbs sautéed with Thai chile peppers. They're served four to a plate, and if my lousy arithmetic is correct, that works out to $2.25 a pop, roughly 75 cents a bite. Worth every penny.
The same goes for a lovely empanada, the flaky crust filled with that premium pork (raised at Tim Fischer's farm in Wadena, Minn., it's truly some of the best pork in the state) and a subtly sweet blend of golden raisins and onions that's balanced by a wicked-hot mayonnaise. Then there's the shears of rich, pink grilled pork, rubbed with coriander and cumin and sharing a wide bowl with slices of fingerling potatoes and bits of mushrooms, black currants and fried leeks, all blended with an aromatic traditional Thai curry. Delicious.
Phanthavong clearly has talent, germinated by restaurateur parents -- they were once co-owners of St. Paul's Pad Thai Grand Cafe -- and nurtured during cooking stints at duplex and the former Zander Cafe. His most lyrical dishes are full-on sensory experiences. A plush seared salmon slab seems to float on a clean, vividly red miso- tomato broth; it's accented with bright stabs of color that come from sautéed kale, edamame and cucumbers. It's a stunner, and it tastes as good as it looks, which is no easy feat. At $16, it's a total bargain, too.
Another winner: Moist trout, seasoned with lemon zest, pan-fried inside an eggroll wrapper and paired with a spring-green edamame-potato-miso croquette. It's clever, and it's tasty. I loved the eye-catching linguine with dainty clams, served in a flavorful curry-tomato-lobster broth sauce. Ditto the shrimp, peas and Thai basil he splashes with coconut milk; its green curry does that magical dance where it starts out sweet and then slowly insinuates into heat as it slips down your throat. The citrus bite in an artful roasted beet salad comes from kaffir lime leaves, plucked from a tree at Phanthavong's parents' house. Tangy goat cheese and black mission figs put a twist on boring-old cream cheese wontons, and greasy shrimp toast gets an attentive makeover, with a smooth shrimp mousse swiped across brioche and a pert mango relish tarted up with jalapeño.
When you're jumbling ingredients and traditions from a host of culinary origins, there are bound to be missteps, and Phanthavong makes them. Braised short ribs were a mushy, overcooked mess, and the dreary black bean purée base didn't help matters. The idea behind a mushroom-mock duck version of beef Wellington was clearly inspired, but while the end result was pretty, it didn't taste like much of anything. Chicken wings were dry and tough, an overfried crab cake was hockey puck-hard and a papaya-mango salad was surprisingly dull. Desserts serve their purpose -- a sweet bump at the end -- but aside from a marvelous cookies-dunking chocolate combo, they don't cast a long shadow. And the kitchen can be inconsistent, with dishes that are divine one night and curiously off-balance the next.
Phanthavong hedges his pan-Asian bets by also serving standards that are widely available elsewhere: pad Thai, fried rice, stir-fries, spring rolls, a lunchtime bento box -- and in my mind it's a wasted effort. I'm not dissin' them -- to their credit, most bear an unusually light touch -- they just don't stand out. In a way, those familiar dishes dilute Phanthavong's ingenious work, and the disparity can be slightly jarring, as if you're dining in two different restaurants. One dinner was so forgettable that, if it weren't for the notes that I surreptitiously scribbled in a stall in the cool unisex restroom, my recall of the meal would be nil. (Re-reading the I-should-have-been-a-doctor chicken scratch that passes for my handwriting, I wrote, "What did I just eat? Don't forget to steal the menu to remind yourself," and that's never a good sign.)
The restaurant occupies the prime corner of a sparkling new condo tower, and its engaging curb appeal is exactly what downtown's often-too-lifeless streetscape needs. Inside, Smart Associates, a Minneapolis architecture firm, has squeezed a lot of design out of what probably was a pretty tight budget, nicely delineating the kitchen-dining room-bar spaces, keeping the color palette lively and opening up fetching views to the surrounding brick apartments and rowhouses.
It's weird to think of 10th and Portland as a pioneering address -- the IDS Tower is just eight blocks away -- but that's what it is. I hope the growing neighborhood will blossom around what Phanthavong and his partners are building. Their efforts deserve an audience. Here's my suggestion: Start with those dumplings.
Rick Nelson • 612-673-4757
