Chow Down at Chai Toong

The eye-popping red and yellow sign outside announces that Chai Toong  serves E-San (northeastern Thai) food. The regular menu shows little of that but sounds pretty much like what you get at Yai, a long-established Thai restaurant in Hollywood. 

This isn’t a coincidence. Yai’s head chef left to take over Chai Toong, which is on Vermont Avenue just north of Los Angeles City College. What they still share is location:  Yai has a second branch farther north on the same street.

Chai Toong now serves Yai‘s lard na (meat and Chinese broccoli over rice noodles), which Thais say is one of the best in town, its crispy catfish salad and produces a better version of roast pork and Chinese broccoli than I had at Yai on Hollywood Boulevard.

The combination of fatty pork belly cubes and crisp vegetable was unpleasantly greasy there. At Chai Toong it is crisp, dry and almost fat-free.

Not everything is the same.  One friend got up and left when a dish that he dotes on at Yai wasn’t on the menu.  I’m sure he’ll be back once he hears that Chai Toong puts out excellent food.

Just one example:  crisp, fried fish, pla lui saun, handled in an innovative way that made a Thai chef friend sit up and take notice. After the backbone is removed, the fish is turned inside out, fried and covered with sliced lemon grass, red onion and spicy sauce.

The sweetened red curry sauce for deep-fried catfish slices is based on curry paste made at the restaurant, not taken from a can.

The eggplant salad is the best I’ve had—smoky, fire-roasted eggplant covered with ground pork and decorated with shrimp.

A wall menu in Thai offers jungle curry,  a standard but very good version of papaya salad and delicious, glistening dark pork ribs that are sour and slightly fermented. 

Or you can stick to popular standards such as pad Thai, red curry, chicken-coconut soup and beef salad. Or try a $4.95 lunch combination.

The restaurant name is spelled two ways—Chai Thung and Chai Toong, the latter closer to the Thai spelling.  Oddly, it opens into Betsy’s Filipino bakery next door so that the aroma of freshly baked bread occasionally adds a new note to the intricate seasonings that make Thai food so compelling.

Chai Toong Thai restaurant, 1001 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90027. Tel: (323) 667-3432. Open daily 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Lunch special 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday.