As winter drags on and the world begins to look colder and more monochromatic by the day, I long for rich colors and bold flavors to wake me up and keep me hopeful that spring will come again. I start thinking about Thai food, and then I head to Webster to visit Phuket Thai. Phuket Thai has been open for six years, but in its new location for only a few months. The restaurant is a family affair. Oulayvanh Vongkhily is in the kitchen, her daughter Sim runs the front of the house, and various other family members fill out the staff. Vongkhily and her family emigrated to Thailand from Laos in 1979, where they opened a restaurant cooking Esan-style food. Esan, as Sim explained to me, is "country-style" Thai that emphasizes big flavors, a bit more heat than Bangkok-style Thai food, and more fresh herbs than its urban counterpart. While "country" cooking is often synonymous with simple, hearty food, there is nothing simple about Oulayvanh Vongkhily's beautifully refined cooking.

Appetizers are served in blue and white rice-ware boats that transformed our table into a floating market straight out of National Geographic. A boat full of summer rolls bumped up against pinkies in blankets; the crispy ground pork-and-corn cakes jostled with fried spring rolls, and all of these fought for space with bowls of tom kha and geow nam soups. The summer rolls ($3.95) - translucent rice wrappers enclosing rice noodles, shrimp, carrot, cilantro, mint, bean sprouts, and onion - were quite good, bursting with flavor. The mint and cilantro acted as a nice palate cleanser next to the fried appetizers. Vongkhily wraps strips of bacon around shrimp, wraps that in a delicate spring-roll wrapper, and then deep-fries it to produce her "pinkie in a blanket" ($5.95). Served with a small cup of nuoc cham (an all-purpose Thai dipping sauce made through the subtle alchemy of fermented fish sauce, rice vinegar, lime juice, and crushed fresh red chilis), these crowd-pleasing snacks put their more pedestrian cousin, the pig-in-a-blanket, to shame. The corn cakes were crispy outside and nearly creamy within, red curry and lime countering the earthy sweet corn and ground pork ($5.95). The Thai spring rolls were a thing apart from the egg rolls at your average Chinese joint. A loose sausage of ground pork, black mushrooms, and an assortment of spices with just a touch of shrimp paste mingled with delicate glass noodles in a crispy, golden roll - dark, warm and comforting ($4.95).

There are few things that cannot be improved with the addition of coconut milk, and soup is no exception. The fiery hot and sour tom yum soup ($3.25-$5.95) is wonderful, the rich fish-based stock awash in tiny bright-red droplets of chili oil and fragrant with lemongrass, ginger, and lime juice. The addition of coconut milk to the same soup mellows the heat and rounds out the broth luxuriously (tom yum nam khoon, $3.25-$5.95). For those with less bold palates, the tom kha ($3.25-$5.95), a creamy coconut soup that substitutes kaffir lime leaves for the fiery chilis, is a delightful alternative, as is the geow nam. Vongkhily makes her own stocks and these give her soups a depth and clarity that I've rarely encountered elsewhere. The geow nam - a simple soup of pork wontons accompanied by bean sprouts, cilantro and scallion - is the perfect place to taste the soup in its undiluted form ($3.95).

Thai food is often synonymous with pad thai, a mixture of stir-fried rice noodle, egg, shrimp, bean sprouts, and onion ($13.95). Here, the noodles are stir-fried with a tamarind sauce, which gives them a nice brown coating and a slight hit of sourness (tamarind is used as a "souring" agent in both southeast Asian and Indian cooking) that complements the smoky flavor of the wok and the pungent crunch of scallions. The soft noodles, the crunch of peanuts and bean sprouts, and the smokiness of the other ingredients offer a good study in contrasting flavors and textures. 

For me, though, Thai food is all about the curry, and the hottest of those curries is green. Kang Kew Whan is a green curry with coconut milk, studded with eggplant, red pepper, basil leaves, kaffir lime, and cilantro ($9.95). What was stunning about the dish was that the eggplant was cooked through without becoming mushy. The skin on these purple beauties was resistant without being tough, and the meat acted like a sponge for the delectable sauce. Kaffir lime leaf was used to great effect here, its cool flavor acting as a partial mask to the intensity of the spice, making it possible to enjoy the dish for several minutes before realizing that your mouth is on fire.

The most subtle entrée we encountered was the mango duck - generous slices of rich duck, sauteed to medium rare with chunks of mango and then finished with a coconut red curry sauce ($14.95). The gamy goodness of the duck worked well with the sweetness of the fruit, and the curry sauce complemented rather than overwhelmed the layered interplay of flavors. I was grateful for the jasmine rice that allowed me to corral the last of the sauce and make sure that not a drop of it escaped.

Asian restaurants are often woefully weak on dessert, but that is happily not the case here. There is really only one choice, but it's so good that you won't care: your big decision is whether to spend the extra dollar for sweet rice with custard or mango, or with custard and mango (my advice is to cough up the extra buck, $3.50-$4.50). Sticky rice, thickened with coconut milk, topped with a sweet egg custard and strewn with chunks of mango makes for one of the best desserts ever. The deep sweetness and agreeable egginess of the custard make a springboard for the almost achingly sweet (and just a bit musky) mango, the whole working together to put out any lingering fire in your mouth and leave you with a sense of peace and well being as you go back out into that cold night.

Phuket Thai

2122 Empire Boulevard, Webster

671-8410

Monday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m.