Dine & Dash: Coconut baths and America's dessert 🍽
Mini reviews of Thai Smile Kitchen and The Ice Cream Mill
Thai Smile Kitchen
Thai Smile occupies the former Whistle Pig Brewing spot at 1840 Dominion Way (just off Academy Blvd., down the hill from the Dublin House). Owner Sunny Originales tells Side Dish she spent nearly 10 months converting the space into what greets guests today — a wide dining room curved around an all-in-one central bar, POS area and host stand. I’m overdue in checking the place out.
Before opening here around a year-and-a-half ago Originales operated a restaurant named Bangkok 89 in Loveland, which is now run by her sister. The family also owns Sala Thai in Windsor, and plans to open a second Sala Thai location in Greeley imminently. All the restaurants share the same recipes and overall menu, she says, promoting her pretty unbeatably priced daily lunch-special menu: all entrées $9.99 or $10.99 (chicken, pork or tofu) and each gets two crab rangoons and jasmine or brown rice. (Spend $1 more for beef or $3 for shrimp; coconut rice $1 or fried rice $2.)
We’re in on a cold, eerily quiet weekend night around 6:30 though, wondering why the dining room is empty but for us. One answer is the frequent arrivals of third-party-delivery drivers picking up bags of to-go food. (People don’t want to leave their houses despite the extra service charges all around and scant margins for the restaurants in this equation. Still, everyone participates, wait staff go home sans good tips and eateries struggle onward.) While we await our food, we sip from pots of floral jasmine and honey ginger teas, mixing the two to lessen the latter’s sweetness.
We order an avocado curry — a dish I don’t recall seeing elsewhere on Thai menus — and stick with the veggie theme by getting it with tofu. It comes in a green curry base and continues the all-things-green concept with bell peppers, zucchini and whole basil leaves. I ask for red chile flakes on the side since the medium spice level my partner prefers rates quite mild to my mouth. We also get coconut rice, which adds more sweetness to the coconut milk sauce base. The dish eats fresh and healthy feeling, though I recall why I usually never order tofu because it’s mostly a flavor sponge and the cook method here doesn’t render them very crispy. (Digression: The last time tofu impressed me was at nearby Nom Nom Thai, where cubes are well-browned in a deep fryer and served with a peanut curry sauce as an appetizer. Digression #2: End-to-end we should just start calling Academy Boulevard what it is, which is “Thai Row.” So many Thai places are along it, and I’m up for it.)
Next up, and pictured at the top of the page, is the beautifully presented Khao Soy, a Northern Thai-style curry noodle dish becoming increasingly popular in the U.S. (first introduced locally by NaRai’s Jasmine Andrew, I believe). Red curry broth forms the base with chicken pieces and shrimp for the proteins and onions and pickled mustard greens for the veggies. Wheat noodles swim inside it and crispy egg noodles compose the pretty garnish with fresh lime. Mix it all together for a textural treat which includes some crunch, faintly sour/bitter elements from the citrus and greens and an underlying sugar sweetness from the broth. Personally I could go for less sweetness, but it’s at a fairly typical level for American Thai food these days (in my experience) and the dish as a whole does taste great.
The Ice Cream Mill
Four-month-old Ice Cream Mill has been the talk of many Facebook commenters since it opened so I prioritized making it north to see what the cold, sweet fuss was about. The shop’s located at the top of a Home Depot parking lot off busy Woodmen Road, and before I get into describing it at-length, I want so say that what two of us shared for a more-than-fair $8.49 was freakin’ fantastic. Especially if you’re a peanut butter person like me.
The Peanut Butter Paradise is accurately described on a special menu board as “layers and layers of everything peanut butter and chocolate.” The frozen-solid, peanut butter chocolate chunk ice cream base with a cookie crumble crust and thin brownie layers (if I discern all that correctly) proves no match for supplied plastic utensils until it warms some. It’s topped in a scoop of meltier chocolate ice cream. Then comes a dollop of whipped cream smothered in runny peanut butter sauce, capped by a Reese’s peanut butter cup. And if that’s not enough PB for your palate, The Ice Cream Mill places a peanut butter cookie as a backstop. Typically the item also gets a thorough Hershey’s syrup drizzle but I’ve despised its flavor since childhood so I request it left off. (Now, if they start making a house chocolate syrup for it, count me in.)
For all that, the peanut butter in various forms with all bites delights. (Say that out loud.) The only off note is we don’t dig the peanut butter cookie style, rather dry with a lingering toasty/burnt-kinda flavor. (Could be the sugar ratio or peanut butter used; I’m speculating.) So, like the Hershey’s, we take it off and thoroughly enjoy the rest.
Now to the decor, which is over-the-top steeped in Americana and patriotic kitsch. July 4 bunting galore! Ice cream flavors displayed on plexiglass panes overlaying an American “Flag of Flavors.” (Visit their website landing page for AI’s interpretation of what it looks like to serve ice cream as an American.) There’s a Pikes Peak or Bust wagon display and a replica wild west town facade with a 3-D awning jutting from the long length of wall. And, under a drop-ceiling featuring bright blue panels with puffy white clouds, you find iconic photo-mural images from around Colorado. Like Crystal Mill, which segues into a real water wheel installation next to rocking chairs for a Southern porch effect. It’s a lot for the eye to absorb, let alone the stomach.
Yet people absolutely adore and go bananas for this place. (The ice cream is good, as I said.) The staff is very on-brand friendly and hospitable. They run orders out into the dining room for delivery. Everyone randomly in attendance feels in-character to us somehow, like we’re on a mini movie set or immersion museum like Meow Wolf, but we’re the only ones not in on the action. We can’t help but joke quietly to ourselves about scenes from TV shows that come to mind. The space-cowboy frontier planets on Firefly. Episode 2 from season 4 of The Umbrella Academy where a whole town of actors are in place awaiting the protagonists.
Not making this up: There’s a guy eating a sundae and sipping a sarsaparilla soda who’s wearing a blue civil war union cap. When was the last time (if ever) you saw someone wearing one of those outside of a historical reenactment setting? Then a handsome young man walks in under a big black cowboy hat with a feather tucked in its band; right on cue for his date-night scene.
Oh, then there’s the auditory experience, starting with a front doorbell that sounds like the Confederate anthem “Dixie.” And wouldn’t you know freakin’ “Dixie” itself is playing overhead as we make our way through the order line. (The song holds a romanticized viewpoint of slavery historically, though some modern folk say it just represents Southern heritage and the like. Either way, it’s a dicey choice as I see it.)
Thinking back on my visit, I’m reminded of a special issue of the CS Indy I once contributed to. We were sorting and shouting-out bars around the city. We would call them and ask a manager to describe their establishment with a single phrase. Our prompt was “come here if you …” and they had to finish the rest. Usually there’d be a pensive, pregnant pause, and sometimes a funny answer. Anyway, I wondered what I would say about Ice Cream Mill were I given the same prompt.
Hmmm… maybe “come here if you like Kid Rock”?
I dunno, but damn that Peanut Butter Paradise was good.
Nice Firefly ref 😄