Amazing, wonderful Thai food if you don't mind the small portions and the price. A great place to bring a date when you want to impress but you know she won't eat very much, so that gives you only a small window of opportunity to buy stuff.

Everything from the menu to the decor says this place does a lot with very little, tastefully in more ways than one.

The menu has no dollar signs, just numbers. Like "6" means "$6." I don't like this trend and I hope it doesn't spread, but it was cute. I like it there at Chai Thai. Just as long as it doesn't spread.

Black linen napkins and they bring you a hot towel. Well, that was nice. Appetizers include egg rolls, spring rolls, satays. I saw stuff like crispy squid.

Entrees on the low end start at $7 like cashew chicken, at the high end you've got seafood herbs for $12. Oh, oops, I mean "12."

Beverages include Perrier water. Now your date will know you've got good taste, for sure. Desert includes my passion, picked up during trips to Winnipeg: green tea ice cream. But no black sesame. Sigh. Can't seem to get it anywhere.

I had a wasabi salad and a soft drink, which set me back $10.71. When the salad arrived, I thought it had fruit on it but then saw it was raw, slightly-seared tuna arranged in an attractive shape. Oh, my word, like a sashimi salad. I was delighted. The portion was small, but very satisfying.

However, I wasn't entirely convinced this was real wasabi and not the common horseradish hot mustard with green food coloring combo so popular in the United States, because real wasabi is expensive. I probably wouldn't know real wasabi if I had it because just about everybody uses the fake stuff and calls it "wasabi."

Once you learn this, it changes you. Forever. That stuff next to your sushi? NOT Wasabi. Not the real stuff, anyway.

In any case, the salad was delighful though not particularly filling. I felt a surge of love for Minneapolis, just sitting there and enjoying that lovely meal. A determination grew within me to make this my home and never have to retreat back to the sticks.

Maybe it was the wasabi or the raw tuna, but I felt invigorated and found myself liking this place.

And that's good because, I must confess, I've had some fun with this place before patronizing it. I used to point it out to my son, how this chic little Thai place was flush up against the down and dirty "Weinery," their doors practically touching in the same little building.

I would tell my son the story of an apartment I managed, how the neat freak lived next door to a compulsive clutterer, and never knew it, though there was a sealed off door between their apartments, and how he would have GONE INSANE if he knew what horror of eye-high clutter was in that next room.

So, yeah, I had some fun with the place before I ever patronized it, but now that I've been there, I love it. Not like I love the Weinery, and I do...a different kind of love. A "I'll take a date there if the opportunity arises but I can't really afford to be eating there myself" kind of love.