Something Special
by Elliot Mackle

"Special" is one of those inexact words like "sale" and "survivor" that means what ever somebody wants it to mean. In restaurant terms, "special" originally referred to a dish prepared from discounted or seasonal ingredients and served at a price significantly less than the menu's average. Later, off-menu specials became popular tools for marketing unusual items or recipes, even if regularly served. Unfamiliar or costly items that do not appear on printed menus allow persuasive managers and servers to do what is called hand selling. When properly marketed, such specials can add gold to the bottom line.

For repeat customers, easily bored chefs or a limited clientele, specials also provide needed culinary variety. Today the word special is more or less synonymous with specialty. Despite what customers may hope and remember about the good old days, specials typically run higher than the restaurant's average. Specials often appear on separate menus - as they were once chalked up on blackboards. At Asian restaurants in Atlanta, choosing from lists of either specials or house specialties is generally a wise course to follow.

That's all true at the newly fluffed and enlarged Thai Chili, and particularly at lunch. Specials are presented in their own illustrated folder. Many are Chef Robert Kankiew's interpretations of palace-hotel dishes created in Thailand. Prices are a dollar or two higher than lunch menu's standard curries and noodles dishes. The extra charge is justified more often than not.

Last week, a lawyer friend and I tucked into plates of spicy basil lamb, three chops per order ($11.25). The lean, tender meat is char broiled on the bone, moistened with thin bracingly spicy gravy and presented on a crunchy mélange of chopped peppers, onions and greens, with mound of aromatic jasmine rice on the side. Though the portions is large enough for athletic office workers such as my buddy and I, both of us gnawed the baby bones for every last succulent morsel of meat, caramelized fat and seasonings.

Khankiew's basil lamb chops have been around for at least a decade. Masaman curry short ribs with steamed vegetables ($8.95) are a newer example of what this kitchen can do when fusing American and Thai methods and ingredients. The beef is lean, the curry flavor permeates the meat but doesn't mask the characteristic sweet-beef flavor, and there's plenty of lovely thick sauce to mix with the rice. Steamed carrots, broccoli and cauliflower served with the curry are tasty and crunchy. This is the kind of cooking that brings fans back to Thai Chili again and again. But masaman chicken with avocado and cashews ordered off the regular lunch menu the same day was blah - hard, tasteless, flat ribbons of fowl decked in a characterless yellow sauce ($7.95). No more for me thanks.

Ducks and vegetables in green curry sauce with coconut milk, much closer to standard Thai-American cooking, is less memorable than the short ribs ($10.25). The meat is moderately lean, the carrots and broccoli cooked al dente, the steamed rice, as always, interesting, itself, yet neutral enough to set off the complex play of sauce, meat and vegetables.

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