Dining out: Orchid

SANDY — There's a friendly, youthful feeling about Orchid, and not just because one of the valley's newest Thai restaurants is located in one of its newest shopping centers, Union Heights.

This restaurant — staffed by a team of fresh-faced, black-clad, enthusiastic servers — takes a friendly and healthful approach to Thai food, keeping the freshness and zest for which the cuisine is known, and adding approachable touches such as reasonable prices, heat levels customized to each diner and more than 50 flavors of tapioca drinks, smoothies and other drinks.

My husband and I enjoyed a "date night" at Orchid, but several families came while we were there and were received with welcoming enthusiasm. The atmosphere is a little noisy — there's lots of concrete and other slick surfaces for the conversation and background music to bounce off — but not annoying.

We started with satay, my husband's favorite, and a bowl of tom kha gai for me. The satay, five skewers of marinated brown-seared chicken with thick peanut sauce and tangy, room-temperature cucumber salad on the side, was lean and tender. The soup, while not perhaps as assertively flavored as renditions I've tasted at other restaurants, was full of milk-white chicken pieces and little whole mushrooms in a white, coconut-infused broth, with Thai basil sprinkled on top.

With dinner, I had a sweet, flavorful peach and mango smoothie with boba, those big, sweet, pearl-sized tapioca. The smoothie was more flavor than actual fruit, but it was refreshing and fun.

For dinner, we had the superior Thai fried rice with pork, fresh-tasting but nutty from being quickly seared, with carrots, peas, onions and shards of scrambled egg, as well as juicy thin-sliced pork.

We also had the Thai chow mein, something I haven't seen on any other Thai menu. True, it's a Chinese classic, but it's given a Thai touch with fresh flavors and a nice black-bean oyster sauce drenching its curly egg noodles, carrots, broccoli, cabbage, sprouts and green onion.

I should mention that most of these dishes are listed without meat on the menu, and customers can add the protein of their choice — chicken, beef, pork, shrimp, tofu — for $1.50. I never found out what Orchid can do with tofu, but its chefs are a dab hand with the meats, serving them lean and moist in every dish we had.