Comfort in a Pot
If Arun Sampanthavivat’s posh restaurant doesn’t fit your budget, try this serene Thai eatery owned by chef Rangsan Sutcharit, a nine-year veteran of Arun’s. The room is simple, but the menu, elegant plating, and painstakingly artistic garnishes are hard to beat at these prices—there’s hardly a dish over $10. Fluffy chive dumplings are light as a cloud and served with a black soy dipping sauce redolent of molasses. The crab rolls are also intriguing: cylinders of ground crabmeat and chicken are rolled in tofu skin, briefly fried, then cut on the bias into one-inch-thick slices and set off by a sweet but piquant apricot honey sauce. Soup and noodle dishes are tasty, especially the house noodles—a large serving of delicate homemade spinach noodles with shrimp, crab, and bean sprouts tossed in a ground-chile-and-tamarind sauce. An entree not to be missed is the beef panang curry; while the beef was sliced a bit thin, resulting in somewhat chewy pieces, the satiny sauce was otherworldly. —Laura Levy Shatkin
$Lunch, dinner: Monday-Saturday | Closed Sunday | Reservations not accepted | BYO | Vegetarian friendly
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Cho Sun Ok Restaurant4200 N. Lincoln | 773-549-5555
Dong Thanh4925 N. Broadway | 773-275-4928
Joy Yee’s offers accessible and well-prepared fare from China, Japan, Thailand, Korea, Vietnam, and Malaysia—and it offers a lot; the numbered menu goes up to almost 1,000. Lemongrass beef, though not bad, was not very good either, but we had a very fresh, very flavorful order of Szechuan green beans and garlic with little clumps of salty fish. Also wonderfully fresh were the ingredients in our chicken udon: meat and vegetables alike had just-from-the-market tooth. There are a number of baked rice dishes served in woodlike canisters. We had the seafood baked rice, which was OK, though I will never accept that krab is seafood. To drink there are Taiwanese bubble teas as well as tapiocas and jelly freezes. —David Hammond
$Breakfast, lunch, dinner: seven days
