Grilled quail at new Khe-Yo made my friend quail: “It’s like a man burned at the stake,” she said. The little creature did look gruesome, impaled on a stick and seared near-black. But ginger suffused the richly caramelized flesh. Bang-bang sauce, a nuclear-strength elixir of Thai chilies and garlic, mortar-and-pestled into a gorgeous lime-juice mosaic, set the bird on fire.
Khe-Yo calls itself the city’s first Laotian restaurant. What a surprise from owner and “Iron Chef” star Marc Forgione, known as a modern-American master, and executive chef Phet Schwader, who although Laotian-born has spent much of his career at the BLT Steak empire.
Although Lao cuisine (as it’s called) is proudly distinct from those of neighboring Thailand and Vietnam, many of its staple herbs and spices — galangal, lemon grass, kafir lime and ginger — are common to them all. Don’t sweat whether Khe-Yo is “authentic.” It’s exotic enough even though it’s Lao by way of Wichita, Kan. (which has a large Laotian-American population), distilled through Schwader’s memories of meals he ate there as a child.
The menu’s refined to a degree you don’t expect in a place where dishes “come out as they’re ready.” Reasonably priced choices (most $9 to $25) are as fine-tuned as they are scorching, so none of the individual flavors is lost.
Leather banquettes and mango-wood chairs make the noisy, hard-edged dining room slightly more comfortable than it looks. A soft glow from a wheel-of-bulbs chandelier hung from the high ceiling’s center radiates barely enough light to reveal an elephant sketched on one wall — or the colorful dishes.
The house pride is sticky rice — a Laos staple. “Sticky rice tastes better when you eat it with your hands,” the menu advises. “It’s our bread and butter,” the waiter says. It’s fun to finger and endearingly toothsome, tight-packed but neither oily nor gluey. It’s served with a mild, chutney-like tomato dip and, much better, that atom-splitting bang-bang sauce.
Lao cooking shuns the sweetness of Thai cuisine, its nearest cousin. (The same can’t be said of salt.) Spices and herbs complement main elements without burying them, as in greaseless Berkshire spare ribs lilted through with lemon grass. Whole black bass, aggressively herbed and deftly fileted, is grand when it isn’t grilled a few seconds too long to retain moisture.
“Khe-Yo” means greens, and they appear on many plates. Some assembly’s required. Large romaine leaves are for wrapping sizzling, fine-ground rock Cornish chicken, bean sprouts and jalapenos, which the waiter accurately warned were “especially hot today.” Its supernova of crackling essences blows away the one-note larb simulations of many northern-Thai places.
Pork belly, shrimp and peanut butter are rolled into crisp rice- and wheat-flour wrappers; you enfold them in bibb lettuce along with bamboo shoots, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers. If it’s too tricky, savor them separately. Coconut rice, kafir lime sausage and chilies are meant to be rolled into iceberg lettuce, but the leaves are too small for the job. Just stir them up and thrill to the smoky, thin-sliced pork and crunchy rice balls.
Less exciting ranks include chili prawns — an unimaginative riff on Forgione’s famous chili lobster — and fluke ceviche and banana flower that is too fussy, although it is tantalizingly fragrant.
Like many Asian-esque eateries such as Talde and Pig & Khao, Khe-Yo falls down on dessert. Its “solution” is a hard-to-navigate affair involving coconut rice, strawberries and cashew brittle.
I’d rather they went out for some decent doughnuts. It would have nothing to do with the cuisine, but a meal so good deserves a happier ending, even if it’s from the deli down the block.