A Modest Blessing in Anaheim

In Thailand, “porn” (pronounced pawn) means a blessing. In Anaheim, it means good Thai cooking, because Anaheim is the home of a fine little restaurant named Thai Porn.

This disarmingly informal place, in a mini-mall that also houses a Thai market and an auto parts store, gets its name from its owner, who happens to be a woman called Pornpan. She named the restaurant after herself on the advice of a fortuneteller.

Pornpan hails from a suburb of Bangkok, but some of her chefs (all of whom are women, in keeping with Thai tradition) are from the region of northeastern Thailand known as Isarn (pronounced EE-sahn), which has a very distinctive cuisine, famous throughout Thailand. The mark of Isarn cookery is a taste for grilled dishes, raw vegetable salads and sticky rice. To me, Isarn food is the most appealing cuisine in Asia, and I recommend that you go heavy on the Isarn items when you visit Thai Porn.

Don’t bother to bring evening clothes when you come. This is a simple, unassuming room decorated with a few silk butterflies, the obligatory pictures of the Thai royal family and not much else.

By the way, the sign outside announces that the restaurant serves Laotian as well as Thai food, but you’ll only find a handful of those dishes on the menu. They’re holdovers from the previous occupant of the space, a restaurant owned by a family from Laos.

One of those Laotian dishes is a variety of som tam, the delectable salad of raw green papaya that is a popular street food all over Indochina. The Laotians don’t share the Thai taste for sweet flavors, so the Laotian som tam is made with bits of salty fermented fish instead of the dried shrimp and fermented crab used in the Thai version, which are sweeter.

You can actually order som tam in either Laotian or Thai style here, and both versions are delicious--and fiery hot, laced with vinegar and chiles. The Thai style is eaten in raw cabbage leaves along with clumps of sticky rice, and this version is expertly prepared at Thai Porn.

So are those Isarn dishes I’ve recommended, but I should point out that at least one of them may be an acquired taste: spicy bamboo shoot (No. 50 on the menu). This is bamboo shoot stir-fried with fresh chiles, sweet basil and red curry. Unfortunately, the menu neglects to mention that it’s made with steamed, fermented bamboo--delicious, but with an almost slimy texture.

Nam kao tod, No. 14, is a Thai pork sausage, grilled, sliced and served with green onions, red chiles, fresh ginger, roasted peanuts, rice and lime juice. The sausage, bright pink inside its crisp casing, is sour in flavor and about as dense as a bratwurst. Nuad dad deal, No. 13, is a sort of Thai beef jerky, grilled and served with a sticky-sweet dipping sauce. Both these meats go spectacularly well with Thai Porn’s sticky rice.

Another outstanding Isarn dish is larb, found in the salad section of the menu. It’s made by combining coarsely chopped meat (you can choose chicken, pork or beef) with chopped onions and chiles, lime juice and toasted rice powder--the mixture is served on lettuce. The rice coats the meat and gives it a mild sweetness, the perfect foil for the sour and spicy flavors that dominate the dish.

And you can certainly get gai yang, the famous Thai barbecued chicken (which is actually an Isarn specialty). This bird isn’t as crisply grilled, as yellow with turmeric or as redolent of ginger and garlic as some I’ve had in other Thai restaurants, but it is moist, juicy and homey-tasting, and it makes the ideal companion for a handful of sticky rice.

Isarn food isn’t the only style of Thai food available here. One non-Isarn dish I’d order again and again is the combination beef noodles, a bowl of food that makes a terrific lunch. It’s flank steak, tripe and beef tendon, plus a few crunchy meatballs, lots of rice noodles and a sprinkling of crisply fried onions, all in an anise-scented beef broth. This is exactly the kind of dish you’d be served at Bangkok’s floating market, and it’s every bit as good here.

Potted shrimp and crab is the perfect companion for the steamed jasmine rice Pornpan serves. It’s a clay pot full of shrimp, crab meat, transparent noodles, celery, carrots and onions, moistened by flavorful broth. Thai curries also go well with jasmine rice. There’s a yellow curry with chicken, full of sliced potatoes in a sauce rich with coconut milk, that’s a hearty, pleasing dish. I also like the heavier, milder mussamun curry, which is a sort of Thai beef stew with sweet spices.

In addition to the Isarn dishes, Thai Porn’s huge, versatile menu covers just about any style of Thai cooking you can name. From Bangkok, where the cooking has a fair amount of Chinese influence, there’s a tasty wonton soup. The Chinese treatment of chicken wings--stuffed with a forcemeat of pork, chicken and shrimp--is also from Bangkok. From southern Thailand come the rubbery homemade fish cakes nam sod and also a spicy squid salad, made with little rings of squid and enough lime juice for a lime rickey.

The specials blackboard, written in Thai, might feature grilled quail, brushed with dark soy; it’s another dish that’s delicious with sticky rice. Or there might be a thick Laotian soup, kao pia, full of chicken, plump rice noodles and cubes of congealed pork blood, an Indochinese delicacy. That pork blood might be another acquired taste, of course.

But return trips seem in order; Anaheim is indeed blessed to have a restaurant like Thai Porn in its midst.

Thai Porn is inexpensive. Appetizers are $3.95 to $5.95. Salads are $4.95 to $7.95. Barbecue is $5.25 to $6.95. Seafood is $4.95 to $8.95.

BE THERE

Thai Porn, 1739 W. La Palma Ave., Anaheim. (714) 956-8105. Open 10:30 a.m.-10 p.m. daily. MasterCard and Visa.