From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published December 27, 2007 Basil Leaf 3$ Riverbend: 1438 S. Carrollton Ave. Reservations 862-9001 Dinner seven nights. AE, DC, MC, V.     An unspoken agreement of long standing among Asian restaurateurs and their customers says that prices and ambitions should be kept down to a minimum. The results were predictable: they explain all the mediocre Asian restaurants around town. Fortunately, more Asian chefs break that old rule these days. Chinese, Japanese, and Southeast Asian cooking is among the most complex, delectable, and beautiful in the world, and certainly deserving of better than neighborhood-cafe treatment.         One of the first to expand his horizons was Chef Bank (real name, Siam Titiparwat), the owner of the Basil Leaf. His restaurant has consistently been one of the best places to eat Thai food in town as a result. Chef Bank buys ingredients of top quality and cooks them with imagination. Both the Thai standards and the original dishes (the latter dominate the menu) are beautiful. Not only because of thoughtfully arrangement of intrinsically pretty foodstuffs, but because the china and flatware and napery are all the stuff of a fine-dining establishment. The Basil Leaf opened a decade ago in an off-mainstream strip mall in Metairie. The food there was always good, but the restaurant was uncomfortable and minimal. Its profile was so low that not even all the Thai aficionados knew about it. Then a great location opened up in the Carrollton section, on the corner of Jeannette and S. Carrollton, near the streetcar barn. Since the Basil Leaf's arrival, the couple of blocks around it have become a cluster of restaurants, with Lebanon's Café, Iris, Fiesta Bistro, Saltwater Grill, and Café Nino all conspiring the keep the neighborhood on people's minds. The restaurant's many, large windows admit lots of light and views of trees, although they're curtained off at the lower level to lend privacy to the diners next to them. The appetizer to get on your first visit is the seared shrimp and pork dumplings. These are big, triangular ravioli, boiled first and then pan-seared to a light brown. What gets you is the sauce. The first sensation is sweet, followed by an unmistakable mint flavor, followed by a savory taste and a touch of pepper. I can't say I've ever had anything with a flavor profile remotely like this before. And it's terrific. Mint and other fresh herbs make for a recurring theme here, and  play an important role in this cuisine. I've never tasted them used as deftly as it is at the Basil Leaf. Enough other good appetizers exist that you could make an entire meal of them. The spring roll is filled with glass noodles, shrimp, and mushrooms and served ribboned with the sauce that's usually used as a dip. The peppercorn-crusted tuna, like something off a Japanese menu, brings cool, fresh, glistening slices with a ginger-tinged salad. Speaking of salads, two of them involving poultry are marvelously vivid. The chicken version is the sharper of the two; the duck salad has a sweeter flavor in its sauce. The usual Thai soups are well-prepared, and the Thai-style hot and sour soup is a model of the genre. It differs widely from the Chinese soup of the same name in that it's light, translucent, and flavored with not only lots of herbs but pineapple. In both Thai and Vietnamese cooking, I like what they do with beds of cool, cooked noodles and grilled meats. Various garnishes and seasonings are applied across the top, and what emerges is always much better than it sounds like it's going to be. The grilled chicken and grilled beef noodle salads are good to split, but be aware that two people might kill an order quickly. Paht Thai is the soft-noodle dish; mee krob is made with fried noodles. Both include chicken and shrimp and vegetables, all cooked together, but that's where the resemblance ends. I have a preference for paht Thai, which tends to the spicy side and leaves you feeling as if you'd really eaten something, without blowing you up. Mee krob, on the other hand, is a bit juicier and crispier, and I find a little of it goes a long way. The Thai curries are good here, too. The green curry is not only the hottest but also the most complex to my palate, because it balances the heat off with the oddly cooling effect of coconut milk. They have a good grilled chicken breast done that way (as well as with red or musaman curries). A couple of dishes fit no standard category. The sea scallops have long been a specialty here, grilled with shrimp and vegetables in a sauce flamed with rum. The musical-sounding dish pad ped moo is pork tenderloin with basil, the fruity-tasting bamboo shoots, and baby corn--very satisfying. They cook specials, and these are excellent--particularly the ones with fresh local fish, soft shell crabs, crawfish, and the like. The sauces range from light affairs featuring fresh herbs to heavier brown sauces that almost seem Creole. You will spend more here than you may be used to in a Thai restaurant, but if you look closely you'll see that the kitchen delivers a better product than most places do. They accompany that with a surprisingly good wine list, and have been known to mount excellent wine dinners. Click here to return to today's edition. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.