At Gai Noi, a restaurant by the James Beard-nominated chef Ann Ahmed, you may count the many ways in which expectations are defied.
Can an all-day restaurant, open seven days a week and serving nearly 40 dishes, more than 10 sides and four desserts to a 70-table restaurant, work? Yes, if you discount the cadence in which dishes arrive (purposely at will); the minimalist batched cocktail program; and the kitchen's occasional foibles, which seemingly increase when the dining room nears capacity.
Can the kitchen be unbending in its menu choices? Yes, if only servers were as spirited as ours, who reinforced what the menu stated — "We don't adjust spice here" — before serving several dishes so hot that they lingered in our heads like bad karaoke — in a very good way.
And can all this deliver up to the standards that granted Ahmed her stature? All things considered, it most certainly does.
It's a mistake to think of Gai Noi as a cobble of greatest hits from the chef's other restaurants, Lat14 and Khaluna. There are dishes that cross over: The basil wings, for instance, are as good as you remember them — batter as craggy as the Rocky Mountains, supremely moist flesh, spicy but not deliriously so. The noodle stir-fries, both the classics and some obscure, but wonderful, regional spins. The jeows, which pair nicely with her sticky rice. And those laabs. My favorite is the Laab Seen because the soft, leathery beef is flecked with chiles and toasted rice powder — a deeply satisfying balance.
But Gai Noi really is more sequel than reprise, a showcase for Ahmed to paint a more intimate picture of her Laotian hometown, Luang Prabang. If you look closely, you'll notice only a few remnants of 4 Bells, the Loring Park restaurant that closed and paved the way for this three-story shophouse reminiscent of something you'd find on the streets of Southeast Asia. The catalog-worthy dining room is filled with communal tables, on which there are vintage tea tins carrying colorful chopsticks. You may find bird cages for lanterns upstairs, and canopies of plants lining a glorious skylight. All-day dining here feels breezy and nonchalant.
To embrace that vibe, order dishes that lean Cambodian. I had the Khao Poon Gai, the region's equivalent of chicken noodle soup, twice because the broth was so rich and clean. I struggled with the Mok Gai, a chicken and spicy rice slurry with overwhelming amounts of dill, that ate surprisingly dry (slightly better was the whitefish equivalent, Mok Paa).
And I began to order the papaya salads with greater regularity once the kitchen adjusted the sweetness and ceded to the unapologetically funky dressing, which boded well for the thin, crunchy ribbons of raw green papaya. These salads are different from the more common Thai staple offered around town, and they're a revelation.
