Royal Yum: the Thai King of Denton Flava
I’ve tried a couple of Thai places around Denton over the years, and Royal Yum takes the crown for me.
Short of backpacking your way to a cart on the Khaosan Road, this spacious sit-down spot on University, across from the puppy end of Kroger, is going to be your best taste of the northern Malay peninsula.
The ambience is on point. It’s a spacious one-room establishment with tables stretched out just far enough to get a warm vibe without hearing everyone’s business. Fans of El Matador, the dressed-down strong-margarita-mixing Mexican joint next to the gym at the University Street Kroger strip mall will feel right at home. Things at Royal Yum move at just about the pace of your favorite bar, where you never have to fight a crowd to get your order in but you’re never going to be harassed into ordering another ‘til you’re good and ready.
The first time I went to Royal Yum was for lunch. I ordered the red curry and my friend had the drunken noodles. I suffer from intense bouts of order jealousy and this was one of the worst. The noodles just looked so thick and juicy. It had that stark kind of smell that worms its way through the nasal passages to an empty stomach and twists it. Mine, on the other hand, presented as slightly watered down, and with hints of not-very-filling. The pale colors of Thai curries always trick me out. My mind is trapped in expectation of one of the thick, glowing Indian curry sauces of England. To me, the Thai version always looks like one of those curries, left out in a monsoon.
It’s only when I bit into the spicy chicken that I remembered how the sweetness of the coconut and the spice of the chili combined for a fresh and tangy experience that I love just as much as the soupier British-Indian experience. Nor does food this spicy, especially in combination with the white rice, require vast helpings to produce a very satisfying effect. It’s refreshing to come into something with low expectations from the colors and plating, and be seduced by the sheer flavor. So much, in the restaurant world, is superficially inviting but same-old, same-old underneath the veneer.
Still, I could not get that first impression of the drunken noodles out of my memory. Like a person whose fascinating conversation you overheard at a party, but never mingled your way over to, I wanted to see the noodles again. So I waited a few weeks, and ordered them on my second visit. Firsthand, they were even more juicy and flavorful than the secondhand aroma and visuals had suggested.
The wait staff are cool. They want to hang with you, not turn over your table. Blind item: one of the other longtime Denton Thai places (a white-guy owned Thai) was not a hangout place, at least when I went there for the last time 10 years ago. It was so not a hangout place that the guy came over to our young family once and accused us of disturbing another customer, who was sitting about five tables away. It seemed like the owner wanted a kid-free restaurant, which I can basically understand. But he was happy with seating kids, taking kids’ orders, and taking kids’ college money. You know the type: a Kid Nazi. I wanted to say: “dude, you’re getting overwhelmed by a couple of slightly giddy children in a 90% empty restaurant? Have you even been to Southeast Asia?” At Yum, they give you the royal treatment. They start you off on the drinks, and the daiquiri I had was sweet and tart in all the right places.
Are you down with Thai desserts? I would backpack across the rain-forested highlands and don those neck-extending rings just to get a taste of that light purple mango rice. It sounds so bland, mango rice. It’s anything but. Royal Yum makes a yummy version. If you ever go to the Farmer’s Market in Dallas, there’s a place called Katip Thai that makes this dish like a pale purple nirvana in a tiny dessert bowl. It should come with a possible-swoon warning. Royal Yum has a pretty darn tasty one on offer, too.
The other thing that Royal Yum gets right are the tidbits. The soup cups, spring rolls, and dumplings, that are an after-thought in most Asian-food places in the U.S., the. These are the food groups where Southeast Asian food really happens. (Viet Bites is another local standout in the soup category.) Morsels, my good friend Connla Stokes calls them in his Bia Hoi literature. I once had the pleasure of attending a Bia Hoi evening curated by Stokesy and our friend Gareth O’Hara in the great city of Hanoi. Bia Hoi roughly translates from the Vietnamese to ice-cool beer. Gareth and Connla gathered some of the great chess minds of the expat community at an outdoor corner bar (Connla had moved to Saigon by this time) on one of the stony back streets that make the city feel like a skinnier Paris with twice the number of Parisiennes streaming through on scooters. The expat crew rumbled to the bar on a fleet of Russian motorbikes, the back of which turned out to be the most exciting and terrifying mode of transportation I have ever encountered. Our table rapidly filled with tiny glasses of gold liquid that tasted like it was piped directly from a beer iceberg – just the tonic in the tropical heat. Soon, we were pointing in one another’s faces, one-upping one another’s chess and drinking-spree war stories. I cannot go into the twists of our tales without spoiling the food content. Let’s just say, a Himalayan dive bar on Christmas Eve, featuring an outhouse and an ice-pick came up, and was widely considered ostentatious luxury.
As in some kind of boozy children’s book, colder and colder beer kept appearing before us, as if the tiny glasses knew how to refill themselves. (After generations of hulking footballers sipping microscopic beer cans in their backyards, you would think Texas bars would serve these thimble-sized lagers that never last long enough to warm up.) As I reached for the next beer, I would occasionally stumble upon tiny plates of spiced nuts, skewered meats or miniature dumplings and sauces. It was a kind of bottomless tapas situation. By the end of the session, I was bulging with tiny bites.
It was these morsels that Royal Yum’s dumplings and soups reminded me of, and that is the highest compliment a fan of Bia Hoi can pay a restaurant.
Thai-food-loving subjects of Denton, bow to the new king of University Street!