The Justice

Media Credit: Julian Agin-Liebes PARTY EVERYDAY: The interior of Tom?Can Cook is taken over with tinsel garlands, colorful lanterns and bright modern art.

Waltham pan-Asian restaurant Tom Can Cook is nothing if not an exercise in contradictions. That is, when it comes to aesthetics: Despite a rather "Confucius say" name, the restaurant is decorated in a strange mix of '90s-era bright colors and Mexican influences, such as earthenware plates and lanterns with paper decorations. Something about the combination of prints of day-glo flowers and copies of works by artists like Kandinsky that cover the walls and the silver tinsel Christmas garlands stretching from lamp to lamp make the place seem like a doctor's office waiting room from a mid-'90s MTV or Nickelodeon sitcom.

If you're in the right mood, the confused décor is totally charming. Last week, as I sat in a booth next to what appeared to be an Easter egg tree, it wasn't. I was hungry. Luckily, I wasn't disappointed by the admittedly unadventurous dishes my dinnermate and I ordered. The Asian favorites, scallion pancakes and pad thai, may cover two different culinary traditions, but they generally do little to stray from the beaten path. Tom seems to understand this. Though the dishes we ordered were fully recognizable as the standard Asian delicacies we're used to, Tom's versions were distinctly its own.

The scallion pancakes didn't look like much on the (colorfully painted) plate. They looked pale, which is to say, not so crispy and brown as at some restaurants. I think I prefer the golden-brown pancakes from the much less classy Lily's Kitchen. What made Tom's pancakes notable is that they came with a rather large portion of thick, creamy peanut sauce instead of the clear, brown soy-based sauce I've come to expect. While I can't say that I prefer a peanut sauce to a soy sauce on my scallion pancakes, Tom certainly gets points for reinventing such a standard dish.

Certainly no dish is more trite than pad thai, but again, Tom's version was different. Unfortunately, again, the reinvention was not amazing. Tom's pad thai is darker, thicker and sweeter than the pad thai I've had at other Boston-area restaurants, like Waltham's Baan Thai and Tree Top Thai. This thicker, darker, sweeter version of every Thai food dilettante's dinner order had no trouble competing with its lighter, more oily sisters, but when it comes to choosing a restaurant on a Friday night, I doubt many hungry college students deliberate over the exact shade and consistency of the pad thai at various Moody Street restaurants.

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