After a few weeks with brown paper taped over the windows, the formerly named Siam City reopened in late April with a streamlined new name, a shiny sprinkler system, and some altered menu items. This smallish bar and restaurant, with its ambiance leaning towards both Old Port sensibility and nouveau Asian-traditional, now carries the tagline " Creative Thai. " This unfortunately gives the suggestion that classic Thai cuisine, some of the most complex and historically representative food in the world, is not interesting enough to stand out as an attraction unto itself.

And this is a shame, because Chef Thomas W. Yordprom seems to pride himself in preparing food in the traditional style. Siam’s menu represents both of the two broad categories that Thai cuisine (and most other developed world cuisines) fall into: street food, ever evolving and learned by rote, and court food, the food for the gods. The simpler items, such as sa-te (skewered and grilled) chicken, mingle alongside the more complex curries and coconut dishes. The spices that make up these curries, as well as lime leaves, Thai chillis, fish sauce, shrimp paste, etc., were assimilated into Thai cuisine through open trade with bordering countries, and Chef Yordprom attempts to continue that tradition by commandeering Maine’s indigenous ingredients.

For example, try the Lobster Vegetables Egg Rolls. To their credit, they were packed with lobster (too many places skimp on the expensive ingredient), as well as rice noodles and a few veggies. They were served with a salty-sweet soy-like dipping sauce, and had clearly come directly out of the fryer onto the plate. This did not bode well for my Spicy Fish Cakes with Thai Cucumber Relish, however, which might have spent a few minutes waiting for the egg rolls to finish up. While they had a wonderful lime and curry aroma, they were more spongy than crispy and pretty tough to cut through. The dipping sauce was a delightfully sour-sweet-hot liquid made from rice wine vinegar, sugar, chillis, cucumber and peanuts.

A brief aside on flavoring: While western cuisine concentrates on balancing out sour, sweet, salty, and bitter, much Thai cuisine concentrates on salty, sour, sweet, and hot. One of the major goals of traditional Thai cooking is to create a mix of intense points of flavor, like a really sour dipping sauce or a scorching Thai chilli, mixed with complex blends of robust ingredients, like red curry, lemongrass, and fermented bean curd. These blends, when correctly done, do not overpower, but create multi-dimensional and complicated dishes.

This technique made itself apparent in my fiancée’s Phat Nam Pik Pao Chicken (as much fun to order as it is to eat! Phat Nam Pik Pao!), a stir-fried noodle dish containing tomatoes, basil, chillis, egg, peppers, and onions. The ingredients read like a mad Italian grandmother’s recipe book, but the dish was more deeply flavored than the simplistic European style. I racked my brains trying to figure out what made the dish so interesting, and concluded that it must have something to do with the combination of marinated Thai chillis with the Thai basil. This purple-tinged leaf is a heartier cousin of the sweet stuff you see on plates with mozzarella and Roma tomatoes, and it has a strong licorice scent. These bold flavors were combined gracefully, resulting in a hearty, if somewhat small-portioned, plate.

While Jackie was making good progress through her dinner, I was having a significantly harder time with my plate. Not because it wasn’t enjoyable, but because I had chosen the spiciest dish on the entire menu: Hot Basil Duck. I asked them to tone down the heat a bit because of my one-alarm limit on stomach fires, and I can only assume (from my " cooler " plate) that the new sprinkler system had been installed primarily to soak down spontaneous combustions. The thing about the Thai chilli is that its heat does not mask flavor, and again, the anise-like basil was a prevalent component of the dish. It was stirred into the deceivingly subtle garlic sauce at the last minute, and the leaves were still vibrantly colored next to the thinly sliced duck breast. Like the Phat Nam Pik Pao (say it with me!), this was a hearty dish, and I ignored my pleading esophagus to finish the whole thing. Again, the serving size was a bit diminutive for the price, and we would have liked to see more on the plate.

Most glaringly missing from the meal were condiments. Many Thai restaurants place small jars of extra toppings on the tables in lieu of salt and pepper, and this would add a traditional touch to the meals at Siam. Everything from pickled chillis to crushed peanuts are appropriate, so you can adjust your meal to the level of hot, salty, sweet, or sour that your palate desires. The lack of these, as well as the chocolate cake and ice cream for dessert (albeit mango, coconut, and green tea ice creams, all home-made and delicately flavored), suggest a bit too much Old Port and just not enough Thailand. A step or two more towards the exotic would be appropriate, and it is obvious that Chef Yordprom has the ability to make that jump.

Phat Nam Pik Pao!

Andy King can be reached at snandis@yahoo.com