Thalia Spice is a pleasantly petite restaurant with 11 tables and six stools fronting the sushi bar (there are a number of private dining rooms off and beyond the main dining room). There's no danger of missing anything here -- with the possible exception of the kitchen, which is one level up from the dining room.

The entrance is on Green Street just off Chicago Avenue. Blink and you will miss the front door (a short-lived restaurant called Spice International once occupied this space), but there's no missing the depth and breadth of the menu.

The adage that a restaurant should never have more dishes on the menu than seats for customers went out the window with Thalia Spice. I could count to a hundred and still have some dishes left over. The menu comes in two parts. There is the predominantly Thai menu, and then there is the separate sushi menu -- though if you look closely you will see some sushi combinations on the Thai-centric menu and some lunch combination specials on the sushi menu. This all boils down to is a concept the menu calls "Asian Fusion Bistro & Bar." How well does the kitchen handle all of this? Obviously, I can't evaluate the whole nine yards, but I did manage a couple of inches. There were a couple of minor miscues, but overall I found more to enjoy than not.

One meal kicked off with Mama's Ginger Chicken Soup. I loved this soup. It had the right amount of spicy fire. The broth (it had a fiery appearance) was lush with chunks of chicken, vegetables and shoots.

Not that the Thai chicken wings were any less aggressively spiced up. Four wings, crispy on the outside and very meaty (almost as plump as legs), got their fire from, as the menu notes, a "spicy Thai sauce."

I am a nut for dumplings, so the Japanese Gyoza were given a try. Not the best ever. The usually tender wrapper enclosing the chicken and vegetables (skimpy on the filling) was tough and unappetizing.

Noodles lovers will have a swell time here. There are no fewer than 10 choices ranging from drunken spice noodles to River Boat Noodles. A steaming, elegantly seasoned broth was rife with rice noodles, bean sprouts, scallions and slivers of tender steak. It's a yummy knife-and-fork noodle dish.

Two dishes sampled under the Entree heading were enjoyable, one more than the other. Ginger Dish allows for a choice of meat (I went with the chicken), and the chicken, a decent amount, mixed it up with cuttings of red and green bell pepper, onions and mushrooms, all in a tangy ginger broth. White rice comes with for the $8 price. Good but nothing special.

Much better was the Dragon Casserole. This creation was all about a ton of cellophane noodles, carrots, onions and pea pods that wrapped around nine small shrimp. There's a stir-fry process behind all of this, and though the dish was substantial, it came off light and pleasing (though with more noodles than I could eat in three meals).

Desserts include coconut and banana ice cream, Thai custard, sticky rice and mango, and mochi (ice cream in a paper-thin rice cake wrapper). Mango mochi for me (strawberry and green tea were also available). There's something about the contrast in coolness and softness and palate-cleansing pleasure of mochi that appeals to me. And this was one of the better versions of mochi that I've had.

Have you recently dined at Thalia Spice? Let us know what you thought. E-mail brunoeats @aol.com with a 50-word review of your dining experience.