Even a cursory reading of my work should tell you I typically eat multiple times in a restaurant before I tell you about it. Several visits not only let me explore the range of a menu, they also place me in different parts of a dining room, put me in the hands of different servers and find me next to a spectrum of fellow customers. Imagine, for instance, if I only went once and the chef were off, the signature dish wasn’t available, the server was working a double or I landed next to an attention-hogging social influencer. Different meals reveal a restaurant’s strengths and weaknesses, its rhythms and priorities.
That explanation isn’t entirely complete.
I’ll share a little secret. In the case of the new Padaek in Arlington, I couldn’t wait for seconds and thirds of the chopped chicken salad called larb, a staple of Thai and Laotian menus that sometimes stars ground meat or tofu and invariably gets its charge from lime juice, red chiles and lemongrass. The balancing act is a good test of a kitchen, one that this spinoff of the same-named attraction in Falls Church passes with flying Technicolors.
The larb is a toss of juicy chicken, toasted rice powder, the fermented fish sauce that gives Padaek its name and chef Seng Luangrath’s favorite herb, lemongrass. Galangal — reminiscent of fresh ginger when young and more peppery as it ages — lends its spark to the salad as well. This is food that puts your taste buds at full attention. (“Alive!” I texted a note to myself the first time I ate it.) Pretty much anyone can sample the pleasure, since the salad, like a swath of dishes here, is also offered gluten-free and/or vegan. The larb is accompanied by a little basket of fragrant sticky rice, from which you form bite-size balls with your fingers and palm and dunk into the sauce on the plate. The process isn’t as messy as you think, since the grains tend to stick to each other rather than your hand.
Padaek Arlington Ridge is the chef’s biggest restaurant yet, with 150 seats scattered across an inviting patio and multiple rooms inside, one of which is art-filled and ideal for private functions. Luangrath says she designed her latest restaurant with her Laotian grandmother’s house in mind, so there are homey touches throughout the light-filled interior. Custom-made baskets from the mother country line the shelves, and painted flowers and birds draw eyes to the kitchen tiles and tabletops. Rattan lights hang from the ceiling and wood accents warm the setting. Padaek does its best to make you forget you’re eating in a suburban shopping center. There aren’t any live chickens afoot, as there were outside Grandma’s house, but the green of banana and coconut leaves infuses the interior.
My eyes keep darting from what’s on my plate to the diminutive chef in the open kitchen. Luangrath, 54, tells me she’s spending seven days a week in her new place, and in my four visits over two months, she has been a constant sight, a hands-on coach to her team. The Thai appetizers are all class acts. The dense but yielding fish cakes underscore her love of lemongrass, which doesn’t hide the presence of fresh dill and lime leaves in the ground catfish. Padaek’s steamed dumplings star chicken and shrimp, lightly bound with egg white to hold the filling together and flattered with a flurry of thin fried garlic on the surface and a dip of black soy sauce, vinegar and Sichuan peppercorns (hence the buzz on the tongue). Maybe you don’t eat meat. Maybe you’ll ease in with cubes of tofu, lightly dusted with potato starch and fried so the outside crackles but the interior is soft as marshmallow. A delicate peanut-tamarind dressing adds depth to simplicity.
As at the original Padaek, this one weaves Laotian flavors into the script. The equivalent of the larb — the dish I could eat every time and never tire of — is a salad of fried coconut rice mixed with funky pork sausage (or tofu), chiles, peanuts, sharp onions and a clutch of fresh herbs. “Do you know how to eat it?” a server asks as she places the mound in front of us. We nod. The jam session is spooned into lettuce leaves, a cool counterpoint, and eaten, quickly and greedily, like a wrap.
Aom is another distinctly Laotian dish, a stew built from a base of tropical herbs and thickened with sticky rice. Diners choose a featured ingredient (I requested tofu, but chicken, pork and beef are options), which bobs along with fleshy mushrooms and green eggplant in the steaming red bowl.
A few dishes into the menu, the difference between Thai and Laotian cooking comes into sharp focus. While the cuisines share many of the same ingredients, Laotian food is neither as sweet or sour as Thai, more reliant on herbs and not as heavy. Both Thailand and Laos serve papaya salad, for instance, but the Laotian version brings on ’da funk not just with the expected dried fish sauce, but also with pungent crab and shrimp pastes.
The kitchen makes terrific beef jerky. Marinated in ginger, garlic and sesame seeds, the meat is a nice demonstration of heat and spice mirrored by a hot sauce calibrated to just shy of liquid fire. In Laos, the meat would dry in the sun; at Padaek, the beef gets flash-fried just before you get it, and is juicier and less chewy as a result. The pork skewers, a main dish, are so big, the hulks look like they came from Gold’s Gym. In reality, they’re pumped up from a marinade that makes them sweet and sharp and gently crisp from their time on the grill. Laos is landlocked, but rich with rivers from which catfish is caught. Padaek fries catfish from the Chesapeake and all but buries the entree in breezy mint, sharp red onions and crisp bell peppers. Dip a piece of hot fish in the accompanying chile-lime sauce and watch sparks (and forks) fly.
While she grew up in a house with almost 20 relatives, Luangrath says her early cooking memories were mostly pounding herbs for basic meals. It wasn’t until after Communists took over that her family fled Laos in the early 1980s and she spent two years in a refugee camp in northeastern Thailand. Luangrath says what she knows about cooking was gleaned from fellow refugees, lessons she put to good use when her family relocated to the United States, first to the San Francisco Bay Area, where, as the eldest daughter of two working parents, the future chef was assigned to prepare meals at home.
Luangrath likes to experiment. Her stretches make up the chef’s specials, including the simply billed crab noodles, a combination of a dish she ate in a Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco and a Thai recipe for mee sua. Thin yellow noodles tossed with Chinese celery and shiitake mushrooms are slicked with garlic butter and finished with nuggets of sweet crab. The invention is a little smoky, a touch slippery, plenty rich — a heady distinction between Padaek and the competition.
If there’s a disappointment here, it’s the pad thai mun goong with jumbo shrimp, which tastes like too much pad thai in this country: sweet. A squeeze of lime and some toasted rice powder, added at the table, improved the eating.
So do the cocktails. “Whatever is in the kitchen, I will use,” says Sunny Vanavichai, the restaurant’s bar manager, a role she played before at Thip Khao, her boss’s popular restaurant in the District, and for Daikaya Group. Pandan leaves impart a subtle vanilla-coconut note to an Old-Fashioned made with aged rum and creme de banana, and tamarind is the sweet-sour punch in a smoky-with-mezcal twist on a margarita, its rim red with salted tomato. Most of the balanced drinks cost a neighborly $14, and I applaud the price of the corkage fee, too. Diners can bring their own bottle of wine to Padaek for just $15.
Padaek Arlington Ridge is the chef’s fifth dining establishment. Luangrath also brought to life the fast-casual Sen Khao in Tysons, which closed during the pandemic, and the late Laotian watering hole Hanumanh in Shaw. One of my favorite places to open in 2019, the latter space is poised to assume a new identity this winter: Baan Mae or “Mom’s house” in Laotian. Luangrath says the forthcoming restaurant will embrace the flavors of her homeland, as well as Myanmar (also known as Burma), Thailand and Vietnam — “anything I feel like.”
Something tells me it’s going to take a lot of visits for me to eat my way through the menu before I tell you about it.
2931 S. Glebe Road, Arlington. 703-888-2890. padaekdc.com. Open noon to 3 p.m. and 4 to 8:30 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and noon to 3 p.m. and 4 to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Prices: appetizers $7 to $15, main courses $15 to $23. Sound check: 73 decibels/Must speak with raised voice. Accessibility: No barriers to entrance; ADA-compliant restrooms.