Pla lard prig, deep-fried snapper, at Siam Cafe.
In the twenty years since I started going to Siam Cafe on McCall Street in Tusculum almost nothing has changed. There's still a cafeteria-style set-up of steam table options for takeout and a western-style dining room and a Thai-style dining room. The latticework walls that divide up the three spaces are still in place. The wall paneling is the same.
In fact, only the knick knacks seem different since my father and I used to eat there in the 1980s. Except that in the interval, the food quality plummeted, so much so that I declined to review it on a visit in the mid-1990s.
As casual dinners go, it was a home run — old friends we cherish and rarely see, and a once-familiar place that's worth revisiting.
