My Name Restaurant

Lanna 

Thai Restaurant 

7227 Memorial Drive 

Tulsa, OK 

918-249-5262

chicken dumplings

I was in Tulsa visiting my long lost pal, and she was suggesting various places to go for dinner.  There isn't a lot of ethnic foods in Tulsa, and my pal loves international flavors, so we opted on Lanna.  Yes, note the resemblance to my name Lannae.  How could I pass up a trip to a restaurant with a name so close to mine!  Lanna is one of the few Thai restaurants in Tulsa.

We got there kind of late, 7:45 - 8:00-ish, so a couple fresh made items were already 86ed.  We wanted fresh spring rolls, but they ran out of those earlier because they are popular at Lanna.  We opted for the chicken dumplings instead.  Before arriving to Lanna, I really wanted peanut sauce with fresh spring rolls, and I was looking forward to the peanut sauce, so I asked them to bring met that sauce with the chicken dumplings.  I thought they would bring the soy sauce based sauce also, but they did not.  It was my fault for not making it clear that I wanted both sauces.  What I learned is that there are certain flavor combinations on purpose because they are good, like peanut butter and jelly, and there are some that are not meant to be.  The Thai hoisin peanut sauce is perfect with fresh spring rolls and not perfect with chicken dumplings.  Soy sauce and citrus sauce is perfect with chicken dumplings.  I wish I asked for the soy based sauce.

For our main entree we shared a dish of green curry.  I love the green curry flavor profile.  Fresh green curry is a combination of basil, lemongrass, galangal, peppers, garlic, fish sauce and other herbs and spices and then all wrapped up in coconut milk.  Really fresh green curry is delicious, but it takes time to do this sauce right. There is an easy way to make green curry and it is to buy a little can of curry paste and combine it with coconut milk.  I usually use the short cut way because it is fast and easy to get dinner on the table.   The easy way is sufficient, tastes good enough and feeds the need for Thai green curry.

green curry

But, dinner wasn't about getting an amazing Thai meal in Tulsa, it was about catching up with my long lost pal.  I miss my pal, she was the glue for a group of friends in Nashville. My pal, when she lived in Nashville, knew of all the art gallery opens (with free wine and snacks) all over the city.  We would get the word from her, met at the first gallery and gallery hop while looking at art, and having some wine and snacks along the way.  It was just a great time.  Then, when she left and took a really great job in Tulsa a couple years ago, the art gallery hopping in group just withered away.  We talked about it, and Tulsa does not have a big local art scene like Nashville does, so she does not have the opportunity to go gallery hopping like we used to.  Since my pal left us to go to Tulsa, I too have not gallery hopped like we used to either.  We talked about how much we missed the free wine and snack tours we took with our pals, and those will be cherished memories and likely never duplicated again.

OK, so we talked about it, but have not come up with a plan for our next visit together.  It will likely not be in Tulsa and Nashville, rather somewhere in between.  I think it would be really fun to get the whole gallery hopping group together again in some fun town in between here and there.  Where should we go?