Adam & Eats: Lotus Thai Cuisine

Editor’s note: Adam Brandt is a graduate from the Cobra Kai School of Culinary Callousness, where he received their highest award, the Red Apron of Merciless Eating. Aside from eating and talking about eating, he makes pots, paintings, prints, books, photographs, and generally, a big mess. He has been the studio assistant at Mudpuppy Pottery for almost nine years and is attending a local university in a desperate attempt to earn a biology degree.

Last week, I received an email from a reader inquiring about Lotus Thai Cuisine in Van Buren. Seeing as how I have been wanting to eat there for a while now, I took this as a sign that now was the time to do so.

So, Anna Parklane, here is what I think about Lotus Thai Cuisine: It has delicious food, friendly service, and super creepy fortune cookies.

Located right off of the Midland Bridge in Van Buren in what was once a KFC, is Lotus Thai Cuisine. My memory is that it has been a variety of Thai restaurants over the years, all under different management.

Regardless, walking into an Orient-themed former KFC is a little jarring. Once inside and the smell of Asian cooking envelopes you, your adjustment is quick. Once adjusted, you will be led to your table by an incredibly friendly and attentive server. Sparsely populated booths and tables combined with dim lighting and a tasteful amount of lotus décor create a comfortable and laid-back dining experience.

Restaurants serving actual Asian food, rather than the all-you-care-to-eat Chinese buffet variety of fare, often draw a certain type of clientele. It attracts the type of customers who gladly talk to each other and offer suggestions to, unbeknownst to them, food critics who are eating at a restaurant for the first time. Let it be known that, although this was my first visit to Lotus, it will certainly not be my last.

While Lotus does offer dishes for people who want to test the waters before driving into the deep, rich sea of Thai cuisine, I found their more traditional, and terrifying to some, dishes shine the brightest.

As per any dining experience you should start with appetizers. Although the chicken nuggets looked tempting, I would recommend, instead, opting for the steamed pork dumplings. These are definitely the best around and they rank pretty high in my experiences with pork dumplings from all over the place. What makes them so fantastic is the dipping sauce. There is something sweet and very familiar in there that will have you dipping everything else, for the rest of the meal, into it. The sticky rice is particularly scrumptious when dipped in it.

Some of the safer dishes I would recommend are the “Chicken Cashew” (stir fried chicken with cashews, bell pepper, baby corn, carrots, and onions) and the “Pad See Ew” (chicken, pork, or beef, with rice noodles, egg, broccoli, carrot, and sweet soy sauce). In the infinitely more terrifying, but equally yummy category I would suggest their “Poh Taek” (spicy seafood soup). Sure it may resemble oily, red, murky swamp water, but it tastes fantastic.

One dish I can never resist is curry. Lotus’s spicy green curry is the perfect blend of heat, flavor, and texture and it will leave you wishing for more, if only to keep the heat at bay for just another moment. My tongue has never felt more alive in my whole life.

No awesome Thai dining experience would be complete without the incredibly deep seeded Asian tradition of a fortune cookie. This is where you will hopefully not end up staring in horror at a tiny slip of paper that was only moments ago hidden inside a folded confectionary item like I did. My fortune read, and I kid you not, “Don’t forget, you are always on our minds.”

Big Brother is watching. And he manufactures fortune cookies.

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