Croydon's Holy Basil takes Thai food up a notch

Croydon. Car yards. Chain eateries. To be honest, I was not expecting to come upon a creative, buoyant Thai restaurant on this six-lane highway 30 kilometres east of the city. Also, this is meat-and-three land so Holy Basil's veg-aquarian focus felt worryingly courageous.

But the happy surprises rolled along from the moment we walked in. This three-month-old restaurant is smartly decorated, passionately conceived and rife with decidedly delicious food.

The forces behind it are chef Duncan Robertson and his wife Julia Phahonvanich. The couple has owned suburban Thai restaurants in the past (River Kwai in Clayton and Vanilla Orchid in Warrandyte) and there's even a YouTube channel, Duncan's Thai Kitchen, to add to their credentials.

Holy Basil feels like the confident expression of decades of experience and consideration, combining Duncan's chef training and love of Thai food, and Julia's Thai heritage and hospitality expertise. The food is very, very good, worth a drive from anywhere in Melbourne, and efforts to reduce packaging, maximise recycling and make everything from scratch are laudable.

My favourite dish is the Burmese pickled tea leaf salad. Pickled tea (or lahpet) is a ceremonial food in Myanmar, used as a peace offering and still common in worship and weddings. The soft, pungent, slightly bitter leaves are also eaten widely in salads. Holy Basil's colourful version strews tea leaves over deep-fried broad beans, lentils and peanuts, and a fresh jumble of tomato, garlic, chilli and purple cabbage. It's a piquant riot of crunch and colour.

Standard Thai dishes are given unusual twists, like the massaman prawn curry that's served with kipfler potatoes (not a traditional Thai ingredient) and the corn fritter mixture which includes red curry paste, glutinous rice flour and shredded banana flowers.

When Julia was a child in Thailand's Issan region, banana flowers were ubiquitous, eaten in salads, curries and fried as a snack. Why not put them in fritters too, she reasoned? They add gentle fragrant notes to the starchy pop of the corn, augmented nicely by the lime mayonnaise that's served alongside.

Crab dumplings are poached in a Thai-style vegan master stock that's another Holy Basil invention, flavoured with shiitake mushrooms, ginger, lemongrass, goji berries, gluten-free soy, coriander roots and galangal. The subtle but persistent flavours of the broth permeate the dumplings, bringing extra depth of flavour to the crab's sweetness.

All the curry pastes and chilli jams are made here, and they're all vegan, with salted soy beans taking the place of commonly used shrimp paste.

That chilli jam (prik pao) brings rounded spicy notes to a cashew and tofu stir-fry with cauliflower and squeaky little Thai eggplants, as well as to the pretty grilled scallops. In general, chilli is used carefully: heat is applied as a seasoning rather than a weapon.

There are a couple of flat spots. The service is efficient and smiley but our waiters either didn't know much about the food or couldn't communicate it. And desserts lacked the finesse of the savoury dishes: where the earlier courses had lift and energy, the sweet stuff was blobbed onto a plate.

Neither of these glitches is enough to stop Holy Basil from being an exciting restaurant. It's so far beyond the bland green curry yawn-fest that is much Melbourne Thai, with frisky flavours and bang-on sustainability ethics. Highly recommended.

Rating: Four stars (out of five).