Mixed marks on White Elephant's offerings
By Matthew Gray
Advertiser Restaurant Critic
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| Pravit Luechaikarm and his wife, Chupima, show few of the many dishes they offer at White Elephant in Kaimuki. The restaurant offers an ambitious range of salads, including one featuring ginger, ground pork and shrimp with fried shallots, fried garlic and crushed peanuts.
Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser White Elephant 3404 Wai'alae Ave. Dinner: 5:30-9:30 p.m., Tuesdays-Sundays 732-7433
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About 20 appetizers are on the menu. Vegetarian, pork and spicy curried beef and potato spring rolls ($6.50 each) are hot and crunchy offerings. The latter are the most unusual, combining curry-flavored meat and potato in a crunchy-starchy contrast.
The ubiquitous skewered satay dishes were dry and chewy both times I ordered them. Chicken, pork and beef ($6.95), along with fish ($7.50) and tofu ($6.50), are the choices. The peanut sauce was somewhat drab and gluey, missing the multiple levels of flavor usually associated with this sauce.
Boxing chicken ($6.95) had been suggested to me, so I finally tried it. It's described as seasoned boneless chicken, deep-fried and flavored with a sweet chili sauce. The concept of this dish works, but the execution did not. The meat was overcooked and tough, and it arrived at room temperature.
Moving on to salads, I really enjoyed the ginger salad ($6.95), even though it took a very long time to get to my table and was incorrectly described on the menu. It was supposed to be made with a seasoned coconut-milk dressing, but in fact arrived in a gingery-sharp, sweet-and-spicy, vinegar-based blend of fresh ginger, ground pork and shrimp with fried shallots, fried garlic and crushed peanuts.
More than 30 other salads are offered here, including the familiar and refreshing green papaya salad (som tum, $6.50) with chili, fish sauce, minced garlic and lime juice.
A wide variety of soups includes tom kha ($6.95 to $8.95, depending on your choice of meat), a tart broth enriched with coconut milk. The predominant flavors are lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves and galangal root (similar to ginger).
It has a bit of spice, but definitely not as much as the hot and sour tom yum soup ($6.95 to $8.95, depending on your choice of meat), dosed up by liberal addition of hot chili. I found the soups lacking in richness and depth.
In contrast, the curries I tried (stew-like red devil and red rama dishes $6.95 to $7.95, depending on meat choice) were too spicy for me.
The baseline heat level is higher than at most places. And instead of bringing color to the meats via sauteing or grilling, most of the meats looked as though they had been poached, boiled or braised in sauce. The garlic shrimp ($7.95), for instance, looked and tasted as though the sauce was prepared separately before the shrimp was tossed in.
Ditto the pad prik king shrimp ($7.95), which should have been sauteed in the flavoring paste (in this case, a peppery curry flavoring), not simply coated with the sauce.
Remarkably, there isn't a menu listing for noodle dishes, the first time I've seen this in a Thai restaurant. The only fried-noodle dish offered here is pad Thai ($5.95). You may find that the flavor and color are different here.
The sticky sweetness of palm sugar and the unmistakable flavor and fragrance of fish sauce seemed to be missing completely, along with the usual reddish hue.
After a pair of visits I wish I could recommend White Elephant, but I found the food inconsistent and uneven in quality, and not on par with the finer Thai establishments around town.
Reach Matthew Gray at mgray@honoluluadvertiser.com.
