I would like to give you the impression that my culinary life is one amazing adventure after another. The truth is that much of the time I eat pretty boring food. But when I do have a food experience that I think could conceivably give the impression that I am living the high food life, I like to blog it. For a Chowhound, the ultimate food experience is the unexpected, the hole in the wall that turns out to be great, the different.

Once in awhile it happens just like that.

Many months ago, Bob and I read an article about a restaurant called Little Thailand. The legend is that Dick was in Vietnam back in the day and married a Thai girl. He brought her back to the states. It didn’t work out. But somehow along the way he ended up marrying another Thai girl and building a restaurant/bar called Little Thailand. She cooks Thai and he makes the steaks and Hungarian Goulash and the hot sauce.

A framed review on the wall calls Little Thailand ‘a trailer park temple to authentic Thai food’ and that’s probably as good a description as any. The restaurant is in the front of a low ceilinged building out past the airport. We drove into the Texas dark, out into country where Austin has not yet become cool and found it under the Garfield water tower as promised. It’s the kind of place that has handwritten signs stuck on the wall that say things like “Killer Thai Bloody Mary’s Awesome and Lip Smacking.” Bob orders one.

It is the spiciest-hot Bloody Mary either of us have ever tasted. It is the first time I have ever had a drink that required a glass of water to go with it.

Surin waits on us. That’s Dick’s wife, the cook. Bob orders Pad Thai (called ‘Pot Thai’ on a menu where the Thai dishes are not spelled like any other Thai restaurant I’ve ever eaten in) and I order the Thai fried rice. Surin asks if we want the spring rolls with that. Of course we do. When she brings out the spring rolls, they are still hot from the deep fryer. So hot that we can’t eat them for a couple of minutes. They come with a sweet sauce (like that sweet orange stuff that comes with spring rolls anywhere) and also with a dark and intensely spicy fish sauce that I have never tasted anywhere else. They’re made from scratch.

A couple of Texans in denim—the lean and quiet type—come in and sit down. Dick, white-haired and stumpy-legged, tells them they should have the Thai Tee Bone steak. The older man says in a flat Texas drawl that he’s had it, but tonight he’s going to have the Thai Curry.

One of the signs on the wall tells us that every third Wednesday is family style night. It’s a fixed menu of Lemongrass Soup, Thai Curry, Larb, and a couple of other dishes ending with Banana and A Glass of Wine. Two people is $30.

Our food comes. And it has that smell. That authentic, ‘I am not afraid of offending people with stuff that is too Asian’ smell. It is quite good.

They say that sometimes when you drive up you have to be careful of the chickens in the parking lot. And that sometimes they sell eggs. They sell Thai jewelry and purses on a table by the front door, and they have a book exchange (Leave One, Take One says the sign.) It’s got weird hippy-Asian lights hung all over the place at random, and bad Asian art, and a photo of the Thai Royal family by the door.

We can’t wait to go back.