From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published May 29, 2007 #41 Siamese 2$ Metairie: 6601 Veterans Blvd. #29 454-8752 Lunch and dinner Tues.-Sun. AE DC DS MC V Thai. The restaurant is absolutle invisible from any road, but everybody seems to know about it anyway. Usually they refer to it as "that Thai place in the strip mall with the TJ Maxx on Veterans at I-10," and rarely give its name. Which is so generic you might not remember it anyway. The Siamese is the longest-running Thai restaurant in town (since the demise of the Bangkok Cuisine), and through its decade and a half or so the family that owns it (and which seems to hold almost all the jobs here) has kept up an excellent consistency record. They offer a very extensive version of the Thai classics, helpfully illustrated by a book of photographs of all the food. It's good that's around, because understanding either the printed menu or the service staff is a bit difficult. (They're very nice people, but very ethnic--a good thing on balance, I'd say.) One of the reasons for the picture book is that the food here really is very handsome. That's a tradition in Thai cooking, one that's not always kept in local Thai restaurants. Start with the satays of beef, chicken, or pork, all on bamboo skewers with a fine peanut sauce. The golden wings are the midsections of chicken wings, stuffed with pork; those too make a nice appetizer. The spicy and sour shrimp soup and coconut-milk chicken soup are both decent. And the salad of squid or shrimp with lemon grass makes a cool, flavorful starting point. If you like mee krob--the old-style crisp-fried-noodle dishes that were popular when Thai food made its first splash in America--they do that well with either shrimp or chicken). Pad Thai is more the vogue now, and that's a better dish. The curries are all here, with whatever protein you want the sauce tossed with. My Thai favorite of chicken and eggplant with green curry and mint is exceptional. They also have a unique roast duck with red curry and pineapple; can't remember seeing that anywhere else. Don't come here in a rush. Also, this may not be the best choice for the first Thai meal of your life, because of the complexity of the menu. But it's certainly worth investigating for further explorations of this delicious, fresh, light cuisine. One more attraction: the prices here are lower than I've seen in any comparable Thai restaurant. This was a restaurant in the 2007 Top Sixty Ethnic Restaurant Countdown. To view the entire list, click here. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.