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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.

Greeting the Thai New Year

Temperatures in the high 90s in Los Angeles weren’t so different from temperatures in Thailand. And they certainly didn’t stop hundreds of people from strolling along the booths at the Thai New Year Festival on Sunday in Hollywood.

The festival celebrates the holiday Songkran, when it’s traditional to douse people with water to clear away the bad from the previous year.

Songkran takes place in mid-April, the hottest time of the year in Thailand, which may also explain this watery custom.  I only got squirted once, and that cool shower was a godsend in the heat.

Food booths selling sate, pad thai, papaya salad, mangoes with sticky rice and much more did such good business that the food ran short before sundown. An outdoor Singha beer café provided liquid first aid to sweltering festival goers.

Proud of their culture, Thais strung flowers into pretty garlands, carved fruits into intricate designs and displayed delicately molded Thai sweets. Booths sold carved wooden elephants, Thai parasols, Thai CDs and many other things.

Thai kick boxing occupied one stage, and a curry cooking contest drew onlookers avid for tastes of panang curry, green curry and even Indian curries. A couple of Indian restaurants, Nawab of India and Bombay Café, had entered the competition and wound up among the finalists. The winner was a curry submitted by the Thai Community Development Center.

The demand for samples was overwhelming. I was lucky to get a taste of one entry, a delicious, creamy chicken panang  prepared by Thai chef Jet Tila. It was smooth, rich, spicy and wonderful.

As soon as I get the recipe from Chef Tila, I’ll let you in on how it’s made. But for now, I  can report that  the key ingredients are panang curry paste, coconut cream, fish sauce, tamarind, kaffir lime leaves, Thai basil and chicken or any other meaty ingredient, even tofu.

Panang curry is easy to make, at least it looked that way as Chef Tila poured ingredients into the biggest pan that I have ever seen.

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