My travels as The Mouth take me to restaurants up and down the Oregon coast and Long Beach Peninsula: from Nahcotta on the Washington side to Manzanita on the Oregon side, and sometimes even places further from home, like Clatskanie. In our region, we have both a wide variety of culinary locales, as well as many establishments whose cuisine is so exceptional that it easily rivals anything found in a larger city. Among these many gems, we are fortunate to have not one, but two fantastic Thai food restaurants. A few months ago I wrote about the incredibly flavorful and authentic fare at Blue Ocean Thai Cuisine in Astoria, and Im equally excited to extol the excellence of Long Beach Thai Cuisine in Long Beach, Wash.

Regular visitors of the restaurant may know that the original owner and chef at Long Beach Thai Cuisine sold the restaurant a little over a year ago, but the new owners have not missed a step in carrying the torch; the menu remains unchanged; as does, it seems, the food.

On a recent visit I sampled a variety of dishes, all noteworthy, and each worthy of recommendation.

A first appetizer of Thai chicken fingers, consisting of deep-fried chicken pieces with spicy plum sauce and topped with fresh basil was, pardon the expression, finger-licking good. I could easily have eaten the plate and forgone any other meal. The chicken itself is crisp-tender, and the spicy plum sauce tangy but with a mellow sweetness.

Up next were fresh rolls, a blend of spinach, cilantro, carrots, prawns and chicken wrapped tightly in rice paper and served with peanut sauce. Fresh rolls are yet another appetizer that could easily suffice as a meal for a light appetite, and as the name implies, they taste incredibly fresh with the crunch of spinach and the grassy spiciness of cilantro.

My favorite Thai dish from any restaurant is Pra Rahm, a stir fry with chicken, spinach, peanut sauce and rice. I am not particularly fond of very spicy food, so I appreciate that this version of Pra Rahm, as well as any dish on their menu, can be prepared without spice, or with as much spice as you can handle. The peanut sauce prepared by Long Beach Thai is absolutely delectable, and I have tried several times, unsuccessfully, to recreate it at home. It is pleasingly sweet but not cloying, tangy or chunky with peanuts, and sometimes I wonder if it contains some secret ingredient.

The happy duck, a half a duck deep fried until crispy and served with sweet and sour sauce and jalapeno basil sauce is another fantastic choice, particularly if you are fond of duck. The duck, when fried, becomes crunchy and pleasingly salty on the outside, but the inside remains sweet, moist and tender. Combined with the various sauces, it is a treat that can surely rival our American fried chicken.

Mango fried rice is another favorite of mine, with jasmine rice, fried egg, mango, prawns, tomatoes and pineapple. The sweet, citrusy tang of mango and pineapple are mellowed by the rice and egg, and tomato lends a bit of acidity to round out the flavor profile.

The only dish during my recent visit that I thought could have used improvement was the Tom Yum Goong soup, a sweet and sour soup with prawns, mushrooms, lemon grass, Kaffir lime leaves and chili paste. Tom Yum Goong soup is typically a blend of complex, intricate flavors in a delicate balance; it musnt be too sweet or too sour, too acidic or too spicy. Ideally, each flavor should blend so well with the next that it is nearly impossible to perceive any one singular flavor, but rather only possible to enjoy a harmonious marriage of flavors. I found the soup, on this occasion, to be too sweet for my liking and without enough presence from either the lemon grass or Kaffir lime leaves. I added more chili sauce to punch up the flavor a bit.

With Thai food being one of my favorite ethnic cuisines to enjoy on a regular basis, I have been to both Blue Ocean and Long Beach Thai numerous times. That being said, I must admit that there is something about the ambiance of Long Beach Thai that is a tad off-putting to me; while the restaurant is clean, decorated with plenty of Thai tapestries and posters, and plays traditional Thai music, I still usually prefer to order take-out. On the day I visited it was unseasonably cold in the restaurant, and each time the door would swing open a cold wind swept through the relatively tiny space, and both factors seemed to make the food on the table cool rapidly.

Still, I am quibbling over a relatively minor point; as I have said before, I am willing to eat in any environment if the food is praise-worthy, and in the case of Long Beach Thai Cuisine, it most certainly is worthy.