Dining Review: Phed Phed in Providence

Be transported to Thailand at this Downcity hideaway with an adventure-driven aesthetic.

5 hours ago

Karen Deutsch,

Shrimp shot with the Phed Phed cocktail. Photography by Angel Tucker

Everyone has their own arresting love story with food. The details and players vary, but at the center is a bite that slows down time, that changes perspective, that broadens horizons.

Krakow fried rice and Thai iced tea. Photography by Angel Tucker

I was seventeen when I first ate Thai food. I was in Baltimore for my first semester of college and, during orientation, headed out to Thai Restaurant on Greenmount Avenue with a group of other students. We ordered as much as we could for the table, including tom kha gai, pad Thai and green curry. And the minute that soup hit my tongue, I lost track of everyone and everything around me. Coconut milk, fish sauce, Thai curries — none of them taste like anything else, certainly not when they’re mixed together. Salty, sweet, bitter and sharp — it was a revelation then, and it remains so to this day.

One of the questions for a cuisine that stands so tall in the mind, though, is whether
it needs to be modernized or if it should remain preserved in its purest state. It’s an equation that Kazu Kondo and X Premwat, both graduates of Johnson & Wales University, have long considered.

They’ve explored and interpreted Asian food through various iterations: First at Ebisu (which they later sold), then at Wara Wara, Tori Tomo and White Owl and now, the Thai-based Phed Phed, which means “spicy spicy.” In partnership with RISD alum Nicholas Mazonowicz, the KNX restaurant group spaces match culinary direction with an adventure-driven aesthetic. In the case of Phed Phed, it’s the streets and fields of Thailand that situate the restaurant space, designed by Libby Slader. Massive wall murals of a tuk tuk in the city, palms blowing in a pink breeze and a forest of bamboo shoots set the stage for a menu that straddles the line between traditional
Thai and an approach that marries the ingenuity of street food with a sly nod to the American appetite.

Khao soi. Photography by Angel Tucker

More than any other vibe, Phed Phed is just a good time. Pink and green are the dominant colors but everything is accented by rattan lighting, concrete floors and Liko Liko Lucky Lion dolls embedded in box frames on the wall. Even the servers match the mood, in both poise and person. Most are young and exuberant, carrying themselves like a work of art translated through ink, earrings, barrettes and bright colors.

There’s no particular demographic in the dining room — work groups sit in a booth, college students are at a two top and several singles are seated at the glossy bar. But all are willing to start with a passionfruit cocktail emblazoned with the Phed Phed logo on frothy egg white, or a mezcal drink anchored by an ice cube filled with purple glitter. But if the bar is a rave, then the menu is a Sunday evening dinner.

KNX restaurant group brought on the chefs from KhaoSan in East Providence to create the Phed Phed menu.

You can order off the Phed Phed or Tori Tomo menus as the kitchen extends through both spaces and both do well with shareable small plates. KFC cauliflower (from the Tori Tomo side) is fried and doused in spicy miso honey, while shrimp are served like shots, on a bed of Chinese broccoli and fish sauce. (It’s a popular dish and you’ll see more than one table clinking their baby bowls as an irreverent prayer before dinner.) But if you want to commune over an appetizer, it’s either Tori Tomo’s fried chicken bao bun (the original Wonder bread) or Phed Phed’s chive cubes ($9). The latter is a collection of square croquettes (crunchy on the outside, almost liquid on the inside) that eat like a three-dimensional scallion pancake. Yes, all day long.

The interior of Phed Phed. Photography by Angel Tucker

Drunken noodles. Photography by Angel Tucker

Entrees tend to stick close to tradition, humming with coconut milk and curry. Green, red and massaman curries ($20–$33) are familiar, though the option to have them with roasted or fried duck is a welcome surprise. Fried rice manages just slightly off the path, particularly with a mix of pineapple, raisin, tomato and curry that still melds cohesively together. Everything is starchy and stewy, which is part of the reason people fall so hard for Thai food. It may be worlds away from New England, but it’s familiar in some immeasurable manner — a comfort that you never knew you needed. (To be fair, pad Thai tastes like nothing else and still manages to translate as the dish you’d eat every night, forever.)

But, as we all know, Thai food has an edge and it shows up in Phed Phed’s spice levels. Drunken noodles ($16–$18) — wide flat rice noodles — are hot enough to make you take notice but not so spicy that you must pause between bites. That’s reserved for the fried eggplant ($20), which will bring tears to your eyes and prove which diner at your table has legit stamina.

A lot of people use Phed Phed as their go-to takeout Thai place, but the pronounced cheeriness of the physical space leads a lot of diners to linger over a yuzu lager, a cocktail and conversation well after dinner. There are also two sweet options, including a fried ice cream with berry wine sauce ($9), which is as kitschy as it is authentic. Better is the classic mango and sticky coconut rice ($9), which is just barely sweet and a juxtaposition of texture that never loses its appeal.

That is, ultimately, what Kondo, Premwat and Mazonowicz do well: They know enough about traditional Thai and Japanese food to take artistic license, and they know enough about design to package it into a space that’s welcoming to all. Given that Phed Phed is their fifth restaurant, one would expect a measurable evolution in the scheme — but the core defining characteristic of their culinary collection is that far-away food not only feels right at home in Rhode Island, it makes the locals feel right at home.