Thai food is easy to come by in Honolulu. Two of the newest Thai restaurants in town, To Thai For and Blue Ocean Thai, are friendly neighborhood haunts if you live or work nearby, with dishes that will satiate and occasionally delight.

To Thai For

To Thai For wins best Thai restaurant name pun in a category crowded with contenders.

The space is a bit more stylish than a lot of Thai restaurants in town, with bright lighting, a pale coat of lime green on the walls, and little accents of color, like the blue cloth napkins folded at every place setting.

Favorite on the appetizer list is the Devil Popcorn Chicken ($9.95), a Thai version of our ubiquitous Korean or garlic fried chicken. This Thai version is crunchy, spicy, and sweet, with fish sauce lending its distinct, salty, pungent flavor.

The amusingly named Crying Tiger Salad ($8.95) becomes an accurate description of "what's going on in my mouth" after a few fiery bites. Soft but chewy pieces of beef marinated in lime juice are doused with a particularly spicy sauce and piled on a bed of greens.

Feeling that To Thai For does a decent job with standards like the spring rolls ($7.95) and pad seyu ($10.95), I try to find something a little bit out of the ordinary and settle on the deep-fried whole fish ($19.95). It comes with a black pepper sauce, piled high with carrots, cabbage and celery that help cut the richness of the crispy, fried snapper and deliciously aggressive black pepper.

Dessert at Thai restaurants sometimes feels superfluous, given the hints of sweetness throughout the meal. But Mom's Special Dessert ($3.95), described by one of Mom's daughters, sounds intriguing enough to try; it changes weekly to get you out of your fried banana and mango and sticky rice rut. One week it's kabocha simmered in coconut milk and palm sugar; the next, it's mung bean and water chestnuts. They're unexpected, light, just-sweet-enough ends to a meal.

Blue Ocean Thai restaurant

Blue Ocean Thai's exterior echoes the industrial look of the Kakaako warehouses surrounding it. Particularly at night, it's a rather desolate location. Perhaps suspecting this, Blue Ocean Thai has installed a karaoke bar on the second floor, as if to become a nighttime destination. But most nights, it appears as empty as the former CompUSA building across the street. The dining room, however, is surprisingly warm and elegant.

The laab with beef ($9.95) — in which finely chopped beef is dressed up with lime juice, chilies, toasted rice powder and shallots — captures all the bright and brazen notes of Thai food well. The drunken noodles ($9.95), too, are aromatic from the generous amount of Thai basil stir-fried with flat, chewy rice noodles.

But the panang curry ($10.95) lacks balance — it's a little too sweet without enough hot curry flavors. The tamarind duck ($18.95), ordered as a departure from old standbys (though I'm too wary to try the pasta Thai-Italian fusion dishes), is better. A sweet and sour sauce with fresh mango and tamarind pool around half a roast duck, which may have sacrificed some moistness for the sake of a very crispy skin. The addictive sauce and caramelized onions help the duck's dryness, but at that price, maybe not.

What Blue Ocean Thai has going for it that probably no other Thai restaurant has: a $14.95 dinner buffet on Sundays, plus karaoke. Maybe Blue Ocean Thai does have hope as a nighttime hangout, at least on Sundays.