The common assumption that all Thai food is hot, or painfully hot, is plain wrong, says Dan Reisch. As floor manager of Toomie’s Thai Cuisine, the downtown Bend restaurant where he’s worked for four years, he should know.

”Generally, the average public will come in here, and it’ll be the first time they’ve ever eaten Thai, and they’re expecting everything to be so spicy they can’t eat it,” Reisch says.

If your palate can’t take the heat, the 118-item menu has something for everyone.

Since all dishes are made to order, the hotness can be doused. If the pan-fried chicken, onion, bamboo shoots, green onion, sweet basil and fresh chili of Gai Prig Prow ($11.95) sounds better easy on the fresh chili, consider it done.

However, it works the other way, too.

If you should desire a mouthful of eye-burning, fiery, molten, red-hot food, the cooks at Toomie’s Thai Cuisine in downtown Bend can fire-it-up on a sliding scale from 0 to 3 stars. Hot dishes are represented by asterisks on the menu, like so:

* slightly spicy

** spicy

*** look out!

That’s verbatim from the menu. It doesn’t mention that the curious don’t have to stop at three stars. There are many more to be had in the Thai galaxy.

Four stars?

Yes, and that’s fine for the cautious.

Five stars?

Oh yeah. You’re getting warmer – but maybe that’s just the food talking.

We’ll skip six, ignore seven and cut to the chase – eight stars. Yes, you can get eight stars worth of ear-smoking spiciness. There were never that many stars in the Spice Girls.

”Eight stars,” says Reisch, ”will definitely put the hurt on.”

That’s what is commonly referred to as Thai hot, and says Reisch, most of the employees at the restaurant have ratcheted their pain thresholds high enough to tolerate the supernova going on in their heads.

”After you work here for a year, you build up a tolerance,” Reisch says.

Icy liquids, such as Thai Iced Tea ($1.95) are advisable should you be so bold.

Lunch is a busy time at Toomie’s, particularly late in the week. ”You can eat for $4.95 (for the special) to $6.50,” says Reisch. ”You can barely get a couple of slices of pizza for that these days.”

Drunken Noodle (**, $10.95) with pan-fried rice noodles and choice of beef, chicken or pork is popular with patrons and staff. Gung Paht Naw Mai Falang ($16.50) isn’t just a mouthful to pronounce, featuring shrimp stir-fried with asparagus, garlic and shitake mushrooms.

Owner Toomie Staver and her deceased husband, George, opened the restaurant eight years ago, and it continues to be family-run. Toomie’s stepson, Joel, waits tables, and her niece is also on the restaurant’s wait staff.

Toomie is from Thailand, as are all the cooks. ”It’s so important to have Thai cooks,” says Reisch. ”It’s not an easy cuisine to cook. It takes a lot of preparation, as far as sauces. They’re here from 10 in the morning until 10, 10:30 at night. We help them with their English, they help us with our Thai.”

Toomie’s features light jazz on Sundays and a pianist Tuesday evenings, but the food is the main draw.

”Food, for sure,” says Reisch. He adds that diners generally learn of Toomie’s from one another. ”It’s all word of mouth.”

But stand back. There could be flames shooting out of that mouth.

David Jasper can be reached at 541-383-0349 or djasper@bendbulletin.com.