I WOULD eat my neighbour's dog, if only to stop it barking at night. But kangaroo? Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, children's television hero, saver of men lost in the Bush and finder of little girls who have fallen down mine shafts? In a Thai restaurant? But then what kind of Thai restaurant is the Wyndham Street Thai? A brave one, certainly. It has opened in Wyndham Street on a site that has claimed its share of culinary scalps. The last of them was the vegetarian restaurant The Frog Pond. The restaurant business is fickle and unforgiving and Hong Kong is a fickle and unforgiving place to be in it.
If success depended on food alone, chef and patron Rosemary Lee would have little to worry about. Her menu is brash and exciting. But is it Thai? Skippy ($85) appears char-grilled with roast shallots as a blackboard special, a starter, not a main course, although most of the dishes could be either or both. His meat is as dark as beef, a little chewy, and with some of the pungent taste of venison.
Like all the food the kangaroo is presented at the table with a flourish. It emerges from the kitchen just like a flock of doves emerge from a magician's hat. It is placed in the centre of the table to be gawped at and poked before it is swallowed.
The meat is cut into slithers and arranged painstakingly between the shallots and among a mountainous pot-pourri of fresh herbs. The spicy squid with nahm yam sauce ($80) emerges with the same panache. Other blackboard specials included two interesting main courses: mud crab with garlic and holy basil ($170) and steamed New Zealand mussels with Thai herb broth ($145).
We chose something more conventional, or as conventional as the menu would allow. The beef curry ($155) and the deep-fried chicken ($162) took their time to arrive but if you want your food fresh, and everything in it fresh, you need the patience of a stone. Things are fresh at the Wyndham Street Thai, the herbs crisp and green with much of their life left in them. The mint, used lavishly in the kangaroo, still smells of mint.
The menu defies categorisation. It is partly Thai, but with pretensions, and sometimes dangerously nouvelle. But then the portions, be warned, are enormous. We grudgingly sent back half of ours, unable to get close to the desserts.