Wild Thai: Garlic, Sweat and Tears
In Los Angeles, Thai restaurants are as common as burger stands, and Thai food is fast overtaking Mexican as basic date-night cuisine. Thai-style shrimp crown upscale chain pizzas and are tossed with Spago pasta; college students raised on Whoppers and Moby Jacks can discourse intelligently on the subtleties of one restaurant’s mee krob and another’s tom kah kai. When Angelenos move to Washington or Paris, their nostalgia for pad thai noodles is as keenly felt as the ache for a decent burrito.
Thai cooking here--though it may bear little relation to what you might actually be served in Bangkok--has become thoroughly familiar. This is an odd position for a cuisine in which nearly every dish is heated up with gut-wrenching quantities of fresh chiles, spiked with weird herbs and seasoned with an exotic, smelly liquid pressed from fermented fish. Good Thai food should always be able to shock us anew--sometimes we forget that the authentic stuff, like certain French cheeses, may take a little getting used to. And the chile is far from the only thing moderated for the American taste.
In the rear of a dingy mini-mall, sandwiched between a doughnut stand and a fading fish ‘n’ chips parlor just west of Thai East Hollywood, Yai is as authentic as they come, a bare-bones restaurant serving informal “people’s food.” On a busy Saturday night it can take longer to grab one of the few tables than it does to order, eat and pay at one of the less crowded joints in the neighborhood. Yai seems especially popular with Thai families. On the walls are posters of what appear to be Thai pop stars, and notices for Thai disco shows; a handwritten sign in English announces the day’s special--every day’s special, really--of mixed seafood sauteed with chile and garlic.
The sort of thing you don’t really find in Ventura Boulevard Thai places is what Yai calls roast pork with Chinese broccoli: fatty, crispy chunks of pigskin on a dark-green pile whose vegetable bitterness cuts through the richness like a knife. It looks something like a spinach salad, and fully half the customers here seem to have an order on their tables. The dish is bound together with a truly astonishing quantity of garlic, enough to induce a garlic sweat in some people that will stay with them for days. There’s a pungent, searing chile dip on the side. And though it’s not hard to like, exactly--in fact, it’s rather delicious--the dish is kind of a walk on the wild side of the Western palate.
Even wilder, too wild for anybody I know to actually eat more than a tiny bite of, is the same Chinese broccoli with a slab of Thai dried fish in place of the pork--a big, bronze thing that combines heroic stinkiness with an awesome wallop of salt. If you’re not Thai, the waitress will look extremely startled when you order this dish. (The combination is supposed to be a favorite in the poorer neighborhoods of Bangkok, but I suspect that you kind of have to grow up on the stuff.) On the other hand, you can find pedestrian renditions of regular Thai food here, pad thai and beef with mint and prik king . . . why bother?
Tendon soup is more like it, a murky, intense beef broth spiked with anise, thick with bean sprouts and afloat with sliced beef and wonderful, gelatinous pieces of long-cooked beef tendon. Beef noodle soup is more or less the same thing, with noodles in place of the tendons, but it tastes a little muskier, as if the stock was based partially on organ meats. Sweet dry-fried beef, gamy and jerky-like, comes with a smoky pepper sauce, like a Thai version of the ancho-chile salsa they serve at Border Grill--the barbecue-pit effect is very nice. Crunchy, bias-cut catfish slices fried stiff as potato chips are mounded with a terrific sweet curry paste.
And Yai is known for its blistering-hot salads, particularly a grilled beef salad that really tastes of good steak under its bath of lime and chile, and also a funky tripe salad. Try the most popular, an Eastern Thai-style salad made of shredded green papaya--closer to cabbage than to a fruit--tossed with carrots and scallions and such in a dressing of fish sauce and citrus that smells fresh and briny as a great oyster, served with a warm mound of sticky rice: shockingly good (and one of the only three or four untranslated items on the menu: ask for papaya salad anyway.)
Restaurant Yai, 5757 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. (213) 462-0292. Open daily, 11 a.m.-12 p.m. Cash only. Lot parking. No alcohol. Lunch or dinner for two, food only, $8-$20.
