Awards
No-VA LIVING  

Best of Fairfax City
Growth in Fairfax City, Fair Lakes, and Fair Oaks means interesting new places to eat.>The Fairfax City area, now including Fair Lakes and Fair Oaks, continues to grow, and the restaurant scene is booming. There are top-of-the-line destination restaurants like Le Tire Bouchon and the Bailiwick Inn plus lots of ethnic restaurants. A recent count shows that Fairfax City has 115 restaurants representing 16 different cuisines. While neighboring Falls Church gets the nod for Chinese and Vietnamese eating, Fairfax excels in Indian and Thai places, and it has some good Italian restaurants. Pad Thai (inexpensive). The smallest restaurant in this survey, with 38 seats, Pad Thai holds its own against a strong field of Thai places. The brother-and-sister team that runs the kitchen and dining room seems to get everything right.Good starters are steamed mussels with a lime-and-chili sauce; hoi jaw, which is crab, ground shrimp, and ground pork wrapped in tofu skin, sliced, and pan-fried; large pan-seared chive dumplings; and several refreshing salads.

Exuberant main courses are duck hi-so, bite-size morsels of duck fried with shrimp, onions, and other vegetables with a black-bean-and-ginger sauce; deep-fried and juicy soft-shell crabs offered with a choice of sauces; flaming watercress, which is more sauteed than flaming; and, of course, pad Thai, the familiar noodle dish of bean sprouts, egg, scallions, ground peanuts, and a choice of shrimp or meat. Several mixed seafood dishes are offered in a variety of preparations—stir-fried, on a hot plate, in a hot pot, and with curry paste. Pad Thai knows how to prepare seafood.

David Dorsen
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