RESTAURANT REVIEW : Thai Food Lovers Can Find 100 Ways to Savor Siam

The deceptively simple dish prik king gives quick insight into a Thai restaurant’s kitchen. Its principal ingredients are green beans, meat (beef seems most suitable) and a chile-based sauce. At its best, this dish is deliciously contradictory, vibrant and subtle, like the prik king served at Siam in Studio City.

The particular appeal of Siam’s version owes much to the way it’s cooked, in chile oil: The tender beef was infused with flavor during stir-frying, not simply coated with chile paste, as in some other Thai restaurants.

For a relatively small restaurant, Siam’s menu was impressive, with more than 100 dishes to choose from. Start with one of Siam’s soups, maybe the tom yum goong , in which shrimp, mushrooms and lemon grass have been cooked to just the right moment. Tom kah gai was another good palate-opening combination of coconut milk, chile oil, chicken, mushrooms, cilantro, lao root and other characteristic Southeast Asian seasonings. At $2.50 a cup--actually a small bowl--it’s a great buy.

Larb gal , like similar dishes from Southwest China and South Vietnam, is meat which each customer wraps in lettuce or cabbage leaves. At Siam the filling was a refreshing blend of coarsely ground chicken mixed with mint leaves, chile, onion and lime juice.

A radically different but equally effective dish is gai num peung , garlic-flavored chicken fried in such a way that the skin is crisp and greaseless and the meat moist and tender. The menu mentioned that the chicken was coated in honey, which at first made me wary. But it only had a hint of honey flavor and, possibly because of the garlic, hardly a trace of sweetness. It was terrific.

Another welcome surprise was ribs kah tiem , stir-fried beef ribs with diced garlic, dotted with coarsely ground pepper. The meat had an unexpected softness that worked especially well with the bits of golden crunchy garlic.

Prah laht prik is a deep-fried whole butterfish topped with a garlic and chile sauce. Although the flesh of the flat fish didn’t absorb the flavors of the sauce, the crunchy parts of the skin did. They reminded me of the fried salmon skins I like so much at sushi bars.

Nothing seemed unlikable at Siam, although a couple of dishes were dull. Gah-thong , a warm chicken, shrimp and corn appetizer served in small deep-fried flour and corn starch shells, lacked distinctive flavor and the usual texture of slightly cooked corn. The eggplant in paht eggplant had not absorbed any flavor from the accompanying chile sauce and so seemed lifeless.

These two slips, however, don’t dampen my enthusiasm for Siam. In addition to the overall quality of ingredients and preparation, portions are generous. Although it isn’t expensive, the restaurant is crisply decorated and, even when full, the room never seems to be noisy.

Siam, 12254 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. (818) 763-7711. Open for lunch 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays, for dinner 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. Mondays through Sundays. Beer and wine. Major credit cards. Dinner for two, food only, $20 to $30.