Dining Brief: Talay

By FRANK BRUNI

TALAY

701 West 135th Street, (212) 491 8300, talayrestaurant.com.

Sprawling over two levels, bathed in colorful lights, pulsing with music, Talay didn’t merely open two months ago in a neighborhood where showy restaurants aren’t common.

It made an entrance, and it made a wager: that a place with enough confidence and pizazz can thrive anywhere, even in an odd patch of Manhattan literally below Riverside Drive and the West Side Highway, a sort of urban canyon with a strangely (and thrillingly) remote aura.

It offers free valet parking during dinnertime. It serves a hybrid of Thai and Latin food, or rather a relay race, with a Thai dish passing the baton to a Latin dish, then the Latin dish handing the chores back over to a Thai one.

So there is a whole crispy red snapper ($24) that looks far, far to the East. But there is a pan-roasted chicken breast ($18) that glances just south of the border, its orientation flagged by a yucca purée. There is both pad Thai ($12) and a paella-style rice dish ($12 or $24, depending on the size), but no cheeky cross-pollination of the two. That’s best. The kitchen doesn’t overstretch.

It does what often tastes like slightly refined Asian-American finger food: lemongrass-scented baby back ribs ($15); crispy shrimp with a sweet chili aioli ($12); crispy pork spring rolls ($8). There is much advertised crispiness, and more Asia than Cuba in the end.

The kitchen is run by Soulayphet Schwader, who cooked at AZ back in the day, and King Phojanakong, chef and owner of Kuma Inn on the Lower East Side.

Their work at Talay won’t turn heads. But I could see a car or two pulling up to the vale