Kiin Thai Kitchen on Auckland's Dominion Road. Photo / Alex Burton
I remember the exact moment coriander came crashing into my life.
Mid-20s, living in Christchurch, and out for dinner with a friend who’d been to Thailand on a student exchange. She ordered soup but not as I knew it.
It tasted of chicken and citrus and chilli and coconut and a million other things I had no words for. I attempted to chew a large hunk of dried galangal and was quietly relieved when I watched her suck a whole lime leaf clean and set it neatly to one side.
Tom, kha and gai were the first Thai words I learned. The product of a childhood where even garlic was a rarity, I had simply never encountered a mouth punch of curry, the zing of a chilli-laced larb - or the creeping heat of a rich, coconut chicken soup.
So much has changed since that revelatory meal. The lime leaves I could once only source dried now arrive by the branch-load from green-fingered friends. At any given moment, coriander is sprouting-growing-going to seed in my own garden. And I married a man whose culinary genius extends to a green fish curry that begins with him strapping a rod, reel and kayak to the roof of the Toyota.
Recently, I realised it had been months (possibly years) since I’d eaten Thai food in a restaurant setting. When my Dominion Rd bus whizzed past the window of Kiin Thai Kitchen and I saw a sign in the window that said mango sticky rice was back, I resolved to reacquaint myself - stat.
PSA: By 8.30pm on a Sunday, they will have almost certainly sold out of said mango. Durian sticky rice? “Sure,” I replied with fake conviction. And thus, 30 years after my first taste of Southeast Asian cuisine, I finally added its stinkiest tropical fruit to my internal flavour bank.
Everything I’ve read suggests that what is inside the prickly-skinned durian smells (and tastes) disgusting. At Kiin, one dining companion likened the taste to fried onion but I caught a cooked ripe banana sweetness on the tongue and a vaguely tropical passionfruit scent on the nose. The texture was soft and very occasionally (and maybe this was the rice?) there was a hit of salt. It was sweet and coconutty; a rice pudding but not as I knew it. I’m not sure I’d eat a whole serve on my own, but I’d definitely share again. (Our very lovely waitperson confided he hates durian but is outvoted at home where its overpowering presence in the fridge means that, eventually, even the milk tastes of the stuff).
Our Sunday dinner at Kiin was book-ended by surprises. I’d failed to check whether the restaurant, recently relocated from Mt Eden Rd, was licensed. It is not, and so we started with an astringent, milky iced Thai tea and what was, apparently, the last available glass of Dang soda - bright red, mildly fizzy and a taste best summarised as “childhood before the war on sugar”.
Thai food is often critiqued for being overly sweet. I wish I’d looked more closely at the photograph of the duck curry from the seasonal specials menu, because the pineapple, lychee and grapes are clearly depicted. Our table was divided. One person liked it and the rest of us thought it tasted like pudding and regretted not ordering the lamb shank with homemade massaman curry paste.
Universally loved: Raw prawn salad. Large chunks of raw red onion, green apple, tomato and celery crunched against the slight stickiness of the whole raw prawns. There were bright red whole chillis, wedges of yellow lime and, at the bottom of the joyfully colourful plate, a potent puddle of sweet-sour-spicy sauce. It was explosively hot, perfectly balanced and not at all what any of us had anticipated.
We also enjoyed the funky heat of the fish sauce and fresh chilli that infused the bamboo shoots in our pad kee mao (we opted for the “seafood” option and the thick fresh rice noodles came with large, roe-on scallops, prawns and fresh broccoli and cauliflower).
Pad khing had the prerequisite fresh ginger flavours (and plenty of chicken, our chosen protein), but was a little light on the promised mushrooms. Meanwhile, back on the seasonal special menu page, it was hard to resist the crab fried rice. Quite peppery, with little flecks of egg and spring onion, it was a lesson in less is more - the crab is not immediately obvious, but there’s definitely something going on that keeps you going back. Much like Kiin Thai, I suspect.
Kiin Thai Kitchen, 360c Dominion Rd, Mt Eden, Auckland, ph (09) 600 2166. We spent: $160 for four.
by Yvonne Lorkin
Spicy, aromatic, Thai food absolutely fangs with the right wine and can turn flaccid with the wrong wine. So let’s ditch the wrong ones immediately. When there’s the heat of chilli anywhere, step away from syrah and cabernet as they will cause a car crash in your cake hole. If you must have red wine with your spicy Eastern food, please make it a light, lush, gentle pinot noir. But for oohs and aahs around the table, every Thai dish, even the red-meaty ones, are better with bright, aromatic white wines or rosés — preferably ones with a splash of sweetness. My default drink, every time, is gewurztraminer. If gewurztraminer was a rock star, I’d be its groupie. If it were a religion, I’d worship it daily. And if I’m eating spicy food, it’s like the last sausage roll at the office shout: if I see it, I have to have it. Pronounced “gar-verts-tra-meener”, it’s an exotically perfumed, intensely fruity style that when translated from German, means “spicy wine”. I adore the heady whiff of turkish delight, toffee apples and lychee that you get in the great ones, though not everyone’s a fan. I’ve got friends, some of them winemakers, who can’t stand the stuff — “blousy, sickly, flowery and poofy” are some of the words that spring to mind when recalling our arguments. But they don’t know what they’re talking about. I love the delicate balance between sweet and acid, and the way good gewurz can transform spicy food into something less scary. It always brightens my mood and it’s so recognisable. Once you’ve tried one or two, you’ll never have a problem picking it out in a blind tasting.
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