Snap Snap

Red Snapper's Kun Pun Gi is even spicier, but it's a sensual fire. Pieces of chicken breast are lightly breaded, fried with dried chili-pepper flakes and finished off with a translucent chili sauce, more sweet than hot.

A few days after having dinner with Judy and Carrie, I returned for lunch with Ned and Lynn; we decided to pass on the lunch specials, which weren't especially cheap and reminded us of old-fashioned Chinese restaurants (Polynesian-style sweet-and-sour shrimp, kung pao chicken). Instead, we sampled offerings from the slightly costlier dinner menu. The soups are terrific here — even the plebeian egg-drop soup is a classy affair. It's not neon yellow and thick with cornstarch; instead, it's a heavenly, light broth in which crunchy bits of chopped celery and water chestnuts float alongside scallions and tiny cubes of milky tofu.

Lynn wanted something light, so she nibbled on a salad topped with grilled chicken (and, at her request, airy squares of fried tofu) and a delightfully clean-tasting lime-peanut vinaigrette. Ned ordered the Thai-coconut red curry stir-fry and was disappointed that it didn't look like any red curry dish he'd ever seen. The silken coconut-milk sauce wasn't red at all but ivory, comparable to an Alfredo sauce —sweeter but just as creamy. "It's Asian comfort food," Lynn said after snagging a sliver of the grilled beef. There was barely a hint of curry, but it was an addictive mixture with lots of peppers, asparagus and edamame bobbing in its cloudy depths.

I was happy to trade lunches with Ned, who had greedily eyed my spicy Korean stir-fry. The secret of this dish wasn't the garlicky pieces of grilled chicken or the chopped mushrooms and zucchini but its glaze: a glossy, firecracker-red sauce made with Korean chili paste.

We opted not to order dessert (they're mostly weird, factory-made pastries anyway, including a tube of fried cheesecake), which was fine with me because I didn't particularly care whether lunch ended on a sweet note.

Dinner, on the other hand, is a different story. And because I'm usually thinking about my evening meal while I'm eating lunch, deep-fried cheesecake suddenly didn't sound that bad.