THAI PEOPLE, at least the ones I know, hate Thai restaurants. They don't deem the food spicy enough or authentic enough, or as good as what they can cook at home. Plus, they all say, real Thai food is street food. It's just plain wrong to eat pad thai noodles off of porcelain plates amidst brass elephants and busboys in bow ties.

I usually nod politely in silent disagreement when I hear this line because, frankly, I like fancy Thai restaurants. My favorite for years has been Midtown's Tamarind -- a place that has always managed to overcome its beachfront-property-in-hell locale alongside the I-75/85 connector with warm style, fine service and spot-on cooking. The food has never been outrageously exotic or markedly different from that at other Thai joints around town. But it has, at least to my palate, been better. The curries are striated with complex flavors. The shrimp taste as fresh as the sea. The rice is never less than perfect.

For more than three years, owners Charlie and Nan Niyomkul have been hoping to open a second restaurant that indeed would take Thai cooking in Atlanta to a new level. From the earliest stages, they talked of offering a nightly chef's table and regional dishes heretofore unseen in Atlanta. Perhaps this would be a place to unite skeptical Thais and non-native fans of the food. Nan, the chef, made frequent food study trips to Thailand. Charlie, the popular host, secured investors, the city's best-known restaurant design firm and a prominent site at the foot of the 17th Street bridge.

Now the bridge is open to traffic, and the restaurant -- Nan Thai Fine Dining -- to business. "Fine dining" is the operative phrase for this dressy, opulent spot. In a town where new restaurant design is an event, Nan is the belle of the winter ball. The Johnson Studio has devised a scheme for this lofty space in white, gold and red that is serene but not stark, regal but not "The King and I." The central dining area is raised and harmoniously open, the pillars soaring, the booths calfskin soft, the brass tableware lovely, and the waitresses -- pressing their palms together in the wai greeting -- even lovelier.

The cooking, though very good, seems to have less to do with Thai regional cooking than with Thai fusion. Rosy lamb chops bathed in a mild curry, whole fried snapper and Maine lobster tail in rice flour cream sauce -- all of it looking like a million bucks -- are the hallmarks of this kitchen. Think of Nan in the same breath as Roy's and Bluepointe: state-of-the-art Asian crossover cooking.

There seems to be one surefire way to order at Nan. Go for a bright-flavored, sophisticated salad and then settle on one of the excellent curries that are the kitchen's pride. My favorite dish at Nan is a toss of crisp-fried snapper bits and green mango julienne with roasted peanuts and see-through slivers of lemongrass hearts. Then again, melting-rare slices of grilled New York steak with iced crudités and chili dipping sauce make as nice a gussying-up of Thai beef salad as you could hope for.

Another way to start -- best for a larger group -- is with Chef Nan's Blue Plate that lets you sample your way through the starters. They arrive in a virtuoso display of carved fruits, radish roses, lacquer and porcelain. I especially like the kanom jeeb dumplings filled with chicken and shrimp. They're like elegant, juicy shu mai and they arrive cradled in a Chinese soup spoon with mushroom soy vinegar. Purple tea rose dumplings filled with chicken, pickled radish and crushed peanuts are lovely to the eye but dry on the tongue. Chewy beef satay, fried calamari and juiceless coconut shrimp seem to have wandered over from a middlin' tapas bar. They seem more like bar nosh than anything.

While you're waiting for your entrees, check out the long, cylindrical objects pointing forth from the ceiling tiles in the side room like ray guns from "Flesh Gordon." What are they? Thai fish traps, and they certainly add some fun schwing to the feng shui. The other décor detail that everyone talks about is the massive bronze tamarind pod outside. I'm just so not going there. Look at the picture and provide your own metaphor.

Things certainly pick up with the main course, particularly if it involves coconut. The kitchen has imported a nifty coconut milk extractor from Thailand, so the curries taste, subtly but persistently, of fresh fruit rather than cans. Braised beef short ribs, as soft as a down pillow, come in a sweet masaman curry that unpacks layers of flavor on your tongue, while the roasted rack of lamb arrives with a simpler yellow curry.

My favorite dish is the Thai-style whole sizzling fish -- here, a snapper -- in a dry green curry with Holy basil and whole clusters of green peppercorns. It's the same dish I've had prepared with catfish in other Thai restaurants, but here the freshness of the snapper adds another dimension of flavor.

A chicken green curry, on the other hand, seemed like it needed a shot of fish sauce and a bit more heat. Even this most fiery of Thai dishes is fairly tame at Nan.

If you do want to try some of the regional Thai dishes the Niyomkuls keep talking about, good luck. I've had none. I've asked servers if there are any specialties I could order, but they all point to the chef's table by the kitchen and tell me to come back with a large group. For $75 a head, chef Nan will cook a special menu with drinks included.

And so I head back with a group of six. It turns out chef Nan is out of town (You think they might have told me?) and her chef de cuisine walks us through what is essentially a best-hits tour of the menu. The wine provided is a clumsy, inappropriate chardonnay -- all oak and residual sugar -- that I soon trade in for a Singha beer.

The appetizers come out course by course, pretty nibble after pretty nibble, and then the entrees hit the table in a great curried whoosh: lamb chops, pork tenderloin, lobster, shellfish. There were also some rice and noodles, but mostly a whole lot of competing curries bleeding into each other on the plate. It's not something you'd see in Thailand, where one curry would share the table with contrasting dishes. The meal ends with a soapy-tasting lemongrass pot de crème and a whole lot of leftovers.

When I tell the manager afterward that although the food was good I was expecting something more traditional, more exotic or more off-menu, he seems surprised. Why, I'm not sure since (a) this is what the restaurant promotes and (b) one of my guests engaged him in conversation in Thai. But to his great credit he insisted on reducing the bill if we gave the chef's table another chance.

We certainly will. With its attentive service, gorgeous setting and decorous food, Nan is just the kind of restaurant I'll be back to, even though I don't yet rank the food as high as that at Tamarind.

Hopefully one day the Niyomkuls will make good on their offer to teach us more about their native cooking and challenge our palates. I think we all, Thais and non-Thais, can take it.

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