On an unseasonably warm day this past January, my husband and I walked into the 50-seat Rim-Lay, a relatively new Thai restaurant in Gloucester in a nondescript strip mall across the street from some of the city’s more recognizable landmarks (Oak & Ember, for instance, and, diagonally, the Beauport Hotel). It was early—just 11:30 in the morning on a Thursday—and yet we were not the first (or even second) table to be seated. Rim-Lay had opened just three months before, in mid-October, the joint vision of three Thai restaurant veterans— Pattama Paengkaew, Mahanop Rueangrotnopphakhun, and Khachain Muangruen—who hail from all over Thailand: north, central, and southeast.
In this minimalist, modern dining room, where the owners still await their full liquor license—I am told this is due to arrive in the coming months, though, for now, diners can delight in non-alcoholic drinks like Thai iced tea and butterfly pea powder lemonade, shaded deep purple—the menu fits somewhere in the middle of that vision. RimLay offers a compendium of northern specialties (curries and, of course, the famed Khao Soi, served in Chang Mai, as travelers to Thailand will note), as well as som tam, or green papaya salad and larb gai, or ground chicken with toasted rice. Central Thailand’s cuisine prevails in dishes like pad Krapow, a spicy stir fry of ground meat and basil and served with peppers and a fried egg, or the universally beloved pad Thai.
The culinary team cooks from all of Thailand’s regions, featuring regularly appearing dishes (those wedded to pad Thai or drunken noodles can find them) and seasonally emerging dishes, too. On the day we dined, a duck soup was just one of a handful of savory winter dishes featured on the menu’s first page. (The dish, the restaurant pointed out, blends Chinese and central Thai influences, and is seasoned with star anise, cinnamon stick, galanga, garlic, coriander root, five-spice, ginger, and white pepper.)
But we started with a play on a traditional New England dish instead: crab Rangoon filled not only with crab stick and cream cheese, but also with cranberry. I had my doubts, but the tart berries married well with the dish, a sort of homage to baked Brie in a dish that too often gets a bad rap. From there, it was all uphill: some of the best wonton soup I’ve ever had, with paper-thin, homemade wontons in an aromatic, cilantro heavy white pepper chicken broth. Then a rendition of a Bangkok street food that tasted just as good as I remember from when I last roamed the Thai capital’s streets over a decade ago: thick, chewy chive pancakes, crisp on the exterior and pliant within, thickly wedged like haloumi (there the resemblance ends).
The restaurant’s som tam is a signature, and a must-order. It comes dressed in fish sauce, plum sugar, and tamarind juice, a heady mixture that is both bright and faintly funky. Strips of julienned green papaya are punctuated by crunchy peanuts, garlic, carrots, jumbo shrimp, and just-cooked cherry tomatoes. Beneath it all, a swell of spice, familiar to anyone who has traveled through Bangkok or any of Thailand’s 76 provinces (and relayed to me by Jessica Thamultree, one of the restaurant’s managers) as “medium heat by American standards,” a fair scale.
By the time our final two courses— pad Krapow and drunken chicken—arrived, the restaurant was completely full, though it was just a touch past noon. The former featured stir-fried meat, punctuated with green beans, cashews, bell peppers, all “drunken,” if you will, in a compelling sauce. But it was the latter that I regarded as the afternoon’s starring dish. Rim-Lay’s pad Krapow is available with ground pork, chicken, or beef (we had ours with pork). A fried egg on top, cooked with a runny yolk, binds the basil-forward rice and meat together. At the table nearest ours, a solo diner agreed. She had ordered the same thing—lunch for one—and had often, ever since the restaurant opened.
I could see the draw. Multilayered, textural, and blooming with echo of basil, it was the vibrant coda to a colorful meal. Well, not quite the coda. As lunch formally ended, we were served one final sweet goodbye: sliced mango, alongside sweet sticky rice, with a plume of whipped cream, an apt ending to an irresistible lunch.