Crumbs in my 'stache: The manifest destiny of good eats

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

By Ben Cannon

Jackson Hole, Wyoming - Teton Thai, a Jackson restaurant with a local following that could be called devout, just opened its sister restaurant in Victor.

The new location had a soft opening Friday night that saw a steady turnout of Teton Valley dwellers, many of them excited to welcome a new restaurant to the sleepier side of Teton Pass.

There are a few overtones in Teton Thai’s Victor expansion, none of which are related to any sort of rift in the extended-family business, said Ryan Haworth, who worked at the Jackson location and now co-manages the front of the house in Victor.

His Thai-born wife, Sununta, will run the kitchen of the new restaurant, while her sister Suchada, and husband Sam Johnson, will remain in Jackson. The girls’ mother, Boonlua Comchomnon, will work between the two restaurants.

“We’re still family, we’re just expanding,” Haworth said Friday evening. “We just wanted to breathe new life into our restaurant.”

The Victor spot sits in what was originally the coal heap of an old railroad depot. It has a warm yet simple interior, one that is both clean and modern but also evocative of Thailand, with a dark, stained wood effect.

Part of the charm of the flagship Jackson restaurant is its lack of indoor seating and a tight and generally outmoded space that few businesses could thrive in as well as Teton Thai has. That, of course, is a credit to the food - fresh, authentic Thai dishes that inspire some regulars to return more than once a week for, say, the Thai-fried rice or the beef noodle soup.

We began off our inaugural Thai meal in Victor with the curry and coconut milk-marinated Satae chicken, which are grilled, unlike at the Jackson restaurant, where they are fried. This is a point of pride for Victor: the Satae chicken, with charred grill marks and served with peanut sauce, is better than the old way.

The Victor location also reintroduced the Panang Salmon, served in a red curry sauce.
“It’s so nice and delicate, the salmon is,” my dinner companion observed.
We sampled an old favorite, the starchy sweet, Thai-fried rice with chicken. Requesting the dish be prepared to “two” from the restaurant’s rather institutional five-point scale of heat gave it a nice, if safe, amount of kick.

Teton Thai in Victor is awaiting a liquor license and Idaho, unlike Wyoming, forbids brown-bagging your own wine and beer.

The move to Victor is a bit of a safety net for Teton Thai that, with an anchor location situated in a building that faces redevelopment, will eventually be ousted from its off-square digs. The plan is to find another Jackson space, perhaps in a yet-to-be-built commercial development.

While promising, the future remains uncertain for Teton Thai in Jackson and businesses, like more and more people, are finding their way to the Other Side, which now has one more gem of a restaurant to add to its small but emerging food scene.

Photo by Ben Cannon, Teton Thai matriarch Boonlua Comchomnon at Victor location.

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Crumbs in my 'stache: The manifest destiny of good eats | Planet JH News Article: Restaurants And Dining

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