(Morain An / For The Times)
Thai is a pillar cuisine of Los Angeles. The largest Thai population outside of Thailand calls Los Angeles home. The community designation in East Hollywood is the only officially recognized Thai Town in the United States. As with Koreatown and Historic Filipinotown, the neighborhood took root when our country, via the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, welcomed waves of migration from across Asia.
As with all of the world’s great culinary traditions, “Thai cuisine” really means micro-regional cooking styles. In L.A., we can taste the breadths. We can seek out the mulchy, herbaceous pleasures of sai ua from Thailand’s northernmost extremes, bordering Laos, noting how the textures of the sausage vary by the hands who make them. Rice is crisped in salads, pounded into noodles, powdered into a seasoning, stir-fried in infinite variations or served plain, sticky or not, as a catchall for prismatic flavors.
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Curries, silken with coconut milk, will change with the color of the chiles in their pastes. Appearances deceive. I did not believe how profoundly capsicums can set a body aflame until I plowed through several bites of kua kling phat tha lung, the hottest dish at Jitlada, during my initiation lunch in 2008. I am long past that milestone, but I’d do it over again that one time.
No matter the headline, I’m wary of the word “best.” These are 15 favorites, often emphasizing the specificity of a Thai chef’s home region. Use it as a blueprint. Wander the outdoor food court of the Wat Thai temple in Sun Valley on an early Sunday afternoon. Find a friend and walk the blocks of Thai Town, scanning menus to see what appeals. There will soon be another restaurant vying for boat noodle supremacy. Maybe someone will soon show up making chor muang, the ornate royal flower dumplings, that I’ve had a hard time finding. Being a pillar cuisine is knowing that room for possibility always remains.
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A-Kin Thai Kitchen
Larchmont Thai $$
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Consider this a fall 2025 placeholder: Chartchai “Bob” Vongsanikul, the poultry-obsessed chef that columnist Jenn Harris wrote about a few months back who spearheaded Roasted Duck by Pa Ord, has left the restaurant. The centerpiece roasted duck is still competently rendered, but if you knew Vongsanikul’s masterwork you might notice the details aren’t quite as meticulous. Vongsanikul, meanwhile, is currently operating out of a ghost kitchen under the name A-Kin on North Western Avenue. The operation also has a full menu of Thai American staples I don’t recommend. I’m here for a roasted duck car picnic; the crackling skin that makes the dish special steams in a plastic to-go container, so I’m writing to say, “Please don’t seal that box.” Splashed with vinegared soy sauce, the meat is as juicy and fragrant as I remember. For travel convenience, skinless duck holds up much better in the red curry and noodle dishes also available. Mostly, L.A. needs Vongsanikul plying his craft in a restaurant space again.
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Amphai Northern Thai Food Club
East Hollywood Thai
(Silvia Razgova / For the Times)
In 2019, Amphai “Nancy” Dunne, who had previously been a private chef for Thai families in Los Angeles, opened her 12-seat restaurant in Thai Town and introduced us to her cooking reflective of Chiang Rai, Thailand’s northernmost province where she was raised. The strategy then was to interact with her over the steam table, pointing and choosing. She made her reputation on dishes such as sai ua, rough-textured pork sausages packed with minced lemongrass; garlicky green mango salad; nam prik ong, the warm ground-pork dip racing with tomato and shrimp paste; and my forever favorite here, gaeng hung lay, pork belly curry with the attuned sour-sweetness of tamarind and julienned ginger. Six years in, the place has mellowed: The menu isn’t quite as exploratory, and there may be more delivery drivers picking up orders than seated customers inside the restaurant. But the food — intricate and distinctive and gentler, perhaps, but potent nonetheless — still does Dunne’s home region proud.
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Anajak Thai
Sherman Oaks Thai $$
(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
If you’ve had any passing interest in Los Angeles dining culture this decade, you probably know the story: Anajak Thai was founded in 1981 by chef Ricky Pichetrungsi, whose recipes merge his Thai upbringing and Cantonese heritage, and his wife, Rattikorn. In 2019, when Ricky suffered a stroke, the couple’s son Justin left a thriving career as an art director at Walt Disney Imagineering to take over the restaurant. It changed his life, and it changed Los Angeles. The creative individualism that Justin has asserted — specifically his Thai Taco Tuesday phenomenon, when the menu crisscrosses fish tacos lit up by chili crisp and limey nam jim with wok-fragrant drunken noodles and Dungeness crab fried rice, and also building what has become one of L.A.’s great wine lists — catapulted the restaurant into one of the city’s great dining sensations.
The restaurant closed for a couple of months over the summer for a renovation, revealing a brighter, significantly resituated interior — and introducing an open kitchen and a second dining room — in August. The menu didn’t radically alter: It’s the same multi-generational cooking, tracing the family heritage, leaning ever-further into freshness, perfecting the details in familiar dishes. Fried chicken sheathed in rice flour batter and scattered with fried shallots, the star of the Justin-era menu, remains, as does the sublime mango sticky rice that Rattikorn makes when she can find fragrant fruit in season and at its ripest.
The restaurant closed for a couple of months over the summer for a renovation, revealing a brighter, significantly resituated interior — and introducing an open kitchen and a second dining room — in August. The menu didn’t radically alter: It’s the same multi-generational cooking, tracing the family heritage, leaning ever-further into freshness, perfecting the details in familiar dishes. Fried chicken sheathed in rice flour batter and scattered with fried shallots, the star of the Justin-era menu, remains, as does the sublime mango sticky rice that Rattikorn makes when she can find fragrant fruit in season and at its ripest.
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Ayara Thai
Westchester Thai $$
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Andy Asapahu grew up in a Thai-Chinese community in Bangkok. Anna Asapahu, his wife, was raised in Lampang, a small city in the verdant center of northern Thailand. They melded their backgrounds into a sprawling multi-regional menu of soups, salads, noodles and curries when they opened Ayara in Westchester in 2004. Their daughters Vanda and Cathy oversee the restaurant these days, but Anna’s recipe for khao soi endures as the marquee dish. Khao soi seems to have become nearly as popular in Los Angeles as pad Thai. This one is quintessential: chicken drumsticks braised in silky coconut milk infused with lemongrass and other piercing aromatics, poured over egg noodles, sharpened with shallots and pickled mustard greens and garnished with lime and a thatch of fried noodles. The counterpoints are all in play: a little sweetness from palm sugar and a lot of complexity from fish sauce, a bump of chile heat to offset the richness. Pair it with a standout dish that reflects Andy’s upbringing, like pad pong kari, a stir-fry of curried shrimp and egg with Chinese celery and other vegetables, smoothed with a splash of cream and served over rice. The restaurant has a spacious dining room. Note that lunch is technically carry-out only, though the family sets up the patio space outside the restaurant for those who want to stick around.
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Chiang Rai
Long Beach Thai $$
In 2022, chef Junyawan Noi Inta and her husband, Kiattisak Suyanon, took over a longstanding Thai restaurant, prominent for its red-brick corner facade, on East Anaheim Street in Long Beach. The couple changed the business’s name to acknowledge Inta’s childhood in northern Thailand, and to redirect customers to a new area of the menu focusing on foods of her native region. Some highlights: a Chiang Rai variation on larb, darkened with a peppery seasoning mix that brings to mind Chinese five spice with its distinct whiff of star anise; khanom jeen nam ngew, a pork noodle soup best when you can persuade your server that you really do want it spicy (it’ll still be manageably under truer Thai heat levels); and a soupy, gingery take on gaeng hung lay, pork belly curry, studded unusually here with cashews. Roti is more of a staple of southern Thailand, but its popularity has spread through the whole country: Start a meal here with a combination plate of roti, served with the requisite yellow curry dipping sauce, and sticky fried chicken wings.
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Heng Heng Chicken Rice
East Hollywood Thai $
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Snacky appetizers like spring rolls, wings and fried shrimp wontons have been added to the menu since Eve Ramasoot first opened her restaurant in early 2023, but reserve the bulk of your appetite for the namesake specialty: Hainan-style chicken and rice, a comfort food Ramasoot loved growing up in Phitsanulok, a city just over 200 miles north of Bangkok. She and her team slow-poach chickens until the meat turns velvety, and then it’s sliced and draped over garlic-scented rice. Rather than garlic-ginger oil on the side, as is often traditional, Ramasoot fashions a more complex condiment, ruddy with soybean paste, fish sauce and brown sugar and spiked with chile. The sauce completes an ideal meal, full-stop. And yet humans crave variation, so the team obliges. You can swap rice for garlic noodles. Breaded, fried chicken thighs deliver satisfying crunch and contrast. Crispy pork belly, served over rice, brightens with the addition of lime dressing. The restaurant is permissive about mixing and matching options. Given all these shiny variants, I still suggest first-timers start by ordering the original chicken and rice, the kitchen’s great achievement.
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Holy Basil
Atwater Village Thai $
(Jennelle Fong/For The Times)
Wedchayan “Deau” Arpapornnopparat and Tongkamal “Joy” Yuon run two wholly different Holy Basils. Downtown’s Santee Passage food hall houses the original, a window that does a brisk takeout business cranking out Arpapornnopparat’s visceral, full-throttle interpretations of Bangkok street food. His pad see ew huffs with smokiness from the wok. The fluffy-crackly skin of moo krob pops and gives way to satiny pork belly underneath. Douse “grandma’s fry fish and rice” with chile vinegar, and in its sudden brightness you’ll understand why the dish was his childhood favorite. Their sit-down restaurant in Atwater Village is a culmination of their ambitions. The space might be small, with much of the seating against a wall between two buildings, but the cooking is tremendous: Arpapornnopparat leaps ahead, rendering a short, revolving menu of noodles, curries, chicken wings, fried rice and vegetable dishes that is more experimental, weaving in elements of his father’s Chinese heritage, his time growing up in India and the Mexican and Japanese flavors he loves in Los Angeles. One creation that shows up in spring but I wait for all year: fried soft-shell crab and shrimp set in a thrilling, confounding sauce centered around salted egg yolk, browned butter, shrimp paste and scallion oil. In its sharp left turns of salt and acid and sultry funk, the brain longs to consult a GPS. But no map exists. These flavor combinations are from an interior land.
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Jitlada
East Hollywood Thai $$
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles)
Few L.A. restaurants, Thai or otherwise, have achieved legendary status like Jitlada. Chef Suthiporn “Tui” Sungkamee, who died in 2017, and his sister Sarintip “Jazz” Singsanong took over the long-running Thai Town restaurant in 2006 and introduced a then-untranslated back page full of radically spicy southern Thai specialties. Those dishes eventually were incorporated into the 10-page English menu, but their written accessibility doesn’t mean their incandescence has diminished. Some suggestions for jumping in: khua kling phat lung, a turmeric-stained beef curry; a salad of fried morning glory, plated so the stems look like they’re creeping over the edge of the bowl; minted Thai pumpkin stir-fried with fresh crab meat; and jungle curry with lamb, so aggressive with capsicums that the experience borders on supernatural possession. The fun, of course, is to show up with a group and find your own favorites. As an embassy for regional Thai cooking, Jitlada remains indispensable.
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Lacha Sochum
Los Feliz Thai $$
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The house specialty of owner Tanya Miyabi and her family is right there in the name: somtum, or papaya salad, in at least eight variations, including additions of salted egg, shrimp, crisped pork and an alternate in which the papaya is deep-fried with a stinging chile-garlic-lime dressing on the side. I prefer fresh ribbons of the green fruit, soaked in the dressing for greater impact, with a side of what is best described as fish floss: steamed and ground catfish fried into a crisp, webby mass. The contrasts in the salad are extreme and gratifying. Beyond somtum, the menu inventories more than 100 additional dishes. Among solid renditions of familiar curries, stir-fries, noodles and soups, I particularly return for Miyabi’s balanced version of shrimp paste rice, served surrounded by piles of dried shrimp, sweet sauce, apple and other garnishes. Mixed together as intended, the ingredients ping every flavor group human taste buds can discern, and probably then some.
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Lum-Ka-Naad
Northridge Thai $$
My favorite new-to-me restaurant in this guide? Lum-Ka-Naad, which operates locations (with some slight variations in the name’s spelling) in Encino and Woodland Hills, but only its 21-year-old Northridge flagship has matriarch Ratri Sonbalee and her signature dish, kuah gling krah dook moo. A dryish curry, somewhere between a paste and a sauce, clings to meaty pork spare rib nubs. The flavors stack like harmonies: citrusy high notes from makrut lime leaves, bass tones from earthen turmeric root. “Spicy only” warns the description, but nothing hit my palate as overly incendiary. Sonbalee grew up in Krabi, a beach town on the western coast of southern Thailand, but she married into a family with roots in the north, and the menu reflects the union.
It’s an overwhelming document, listing over 150 items: To delve into some lesser-seen gems, center your ordering to the sections detailing northern and southern specialties. From the south, beyond the kuah gling (also commonly spelled kua kling), there’s a refreshing, umami-spiked salad of anchovies paired with matchsticks of tart green apple, and kanom jeen tai pla, a deliciously potent and herbal soup of smoked and fermented fish with bamboo shoots and other vegetables, served with a side of noodles. From the north, look for hor noong, a tamale-like construction of chicken in creamy yellow curry steamed in banana leaves. When we asked our server to suggest a noodle dish, he pointed out kang ho, a pan-fried assembly of vermicelli, vegetables and Thai-Burmese curry powder (leaning slightly toward sweeter spices and black pepper) originally conceived as a way to use leftovers. Everything tasted impeccably fresh in this version, and was even better with the addition of shrimp.
It’s an overwhelming document, listing over 150 items: To delve into some lesser-seen gems, center your ordering to the sections detailing northern and southern specialties. From the south, beyond the kuah gling (also commonly spelled kua kling), there’s a refreshing, umami-spiked salad of anchovies paired with matchsticks of tart green apple, and kanom jeen tai pla, a deliciously potent and herbal soup of smoked and fermented fish with bamboo shoots and other vegetables, served with a side of noodles. From the north, look for hor noong, a tamale-like construction of chicken in creamy yellow curry steamed in banana leaves. When we asked our server to suggest a noodle dish, he pointed out kang ho, a pan-fried assembly of vermicelli, vegetables and Thai-Burmese curry powder (leaning slightly toward sweeter spices and black pepper) originally conceived as a way to use leftovers. Everything tasted impeccably fresh in this version, and was even better with the addition of shrimp.
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Luv2eat Thai Bistro
Hollywood Thai $$
(Shelby Moore/For The Times)
In the 11 years since Somruthai Kaewtathip (nicknamed Fern) and Noree Burapapituk (who goes by Pla) opened their first local restaurant in a Hollywood strip mall, it has become one of the great centrists among our astounding breadth of Thai restaurants. Its spiciest efforts will rarely liquify your taste buds. And the menu broadly surveys popular dishes, rather than drilling down on a specific region of Thai cooking. That said, Kaewtathip and Burapapituk are natives of Phuket: Home in on the short list of chef’s specials inspired by that island of sculptural mountains and touristy beaches, and by nearby provinces of southern Thailand. First up: the menu’s star crab curry, fragrant with lemongrass, galangal, makrut lime zest and a whiff of shrimp paste. Request it as spicy as you can handle it; here the kitchen employs capsicums as much to heighten flavors as to sear taste buds. Round out the meal with jade noodles glossed with duck and pork, a rendition that rivals the beloved version a couple of miles away at Sapp Coffee Shop, and marinated pork skewers called moo-ping, served with limey dipping sauce.
Last year the pair opened spinoff Luv2Eat Express in the same plaza, centered on a cafeteria-style format where the staff fills metal plates with carefully spiced curries and soups ladled from steam-table bins. It’s an opportunity for the chefs to vary their repertoires, and the scene is often calm. When the bistro is packed and you’re in a hurry, this is your excellent alternative.
Last year the pair opened spinoff Luv2Eat Express in the same plaza, centered on a cafeteria-style format where the staff fills metal plates with carefully spiced curries and soups ladled from steam-table bins. It’s an opportunity for the chefs to vary their repertoires, and the scene is often calm. When the bistro is packed and you’re in a hurry, this is your excellent alternative.
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Mae Malai House of Noodles
Los Feliz Thai $
(Ron De Angelis/For The Times)
Boat noodles are their subsect of L.A. dining culture. Pa Ord is an enduring, widely-agreed-upon classic destination. Mesa Thai in East Hollywood serves a bowl of them that’s thick and intriguingly spiced. But who’s making the superlative version right now? My vote is Malai Data, using a recipe gleaned from her mother-in-law, who’s made the dish professionally in Bangkok for decades. Find Data in the shopping complex at Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue, in a room with traffic-cone orange walls and a fleet staff of servers. The short menu, including basil-scented egg rolls and respectable pad see ew, is roundly satisfying, but the boat noodles are the incontestable star attraction. Servings at Mae Malai are small and under $10, a time-honored practice: In Bangkok part of the fun is going from stall to stall, tasting each cook’s individualizations. I ask for thin rice noodles (among six options), as the server recommends; pork over beef; and “spicy” rather than “Thai spicy.” At this level, the chile heat races across the taste buds as a big first sensation and then retreats, balancing the broth’s sweetness and vinegary thwack. Spices like star anise and white pepper glint while crumbled fried pork skin rustle against the teeth, and bites of the bowl’s solo pork meatball bounce around the palate. The noodles feel squiggly, and they’re gone quickly, until only the must-sip liquid dregs remain, tingly and the color of black coffee.
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Miya
Altadena Thai $$
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Altadena’s Thai oasis — run by David Tewasart, who operates four locations of Sticky Rice plus Moon Rabbit in Grand Central Market — opened in January 2023, two years before the annihilating Eaton Fire forever changed the community. Incredibly, the restaurant’s building survived, and Tewasart began welcoming customers again in late May. It’s uplifting, maybe also a little startling, to return and take in the tiny main dining room’s touchstone decor: the 80s-era Panasonic boombox with a shelf full of Thai pop music cassettes below, the vintage sci-fi movie posters, the succinct handwritten menu taped to the wall behind the ordering counter. Black-and-white geometric tiles, colorful stained glass and a blown-up cover of Madonna’s first album complete a newer 30-seat room. The cooking at Miya has never been about stoking the extremes of Thai cuisine, but about offering its comforts. Rather than assertive, khao soi is a bowl of balm, with an extra-large bottle of chile sauce always nearby to up the heat. Among a short list of noodles, the staff quickly recommends vegetable-laden pad kee mao for its smoky sear. An ideal lunch: crackly battered Thai fried chicken, served with sticky rice and a simple papaya salad, plus a side of bright-green earthy-sweet morning glory barely scented with garlic. Some people rush in to grab take-out orders, but plenty of others settle at a table, even if they don’t linger, savoring the wonder of being here.
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Ruen Pair
Los Feliz Thai $$
(Ruen Pair)
Every city, even one as saturated in regional specificity as Los Angeles, needs a great generalist Thai restaurant. Ruen Pair is ours. At night, in an otherwise sleepy U-shaped mini-mall in Thai Town, customers pour out of Ruen Pair’s doors, congregating on the sidewalk steps hoping to hear their name called for a seat. Go ahead and order what you want: glossy curries in a pastel rainbow (vegan options available), pad Thai revved with as many spicy condiments as you can handle, a plate of stewed pork leg meat scattered over rice with spiced gravy, chile sauce and pickles. If you go looking for it, a Thai-Chinese class of dishes does wind through the enormous menu: A frontrunner among them is yen ta fo, a Bangkok street food known as the “pink noodle soup,” deriving its name from umami-riddled red fermented bean curd paste in the broth. Fish cake and other seafood bob on the surface. Slurp away. Someone’s waiting for your table.
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Sapp Coffee Shop
Los Feliz Thai $
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
A late-morning breakfast of noodles at Sapp is an L.A. rite of passage. Generations of Angelenos swear by the boat noodles, still righteously funky and chiming with meaty, fried textures in every spoonful. I lean to the jade noodles, springy strands dyed with spinach juice to the color of Anjou pear skin. They’re buried under crunchy bits of roast pork, frilly crab, sliced duck and condiments that include a small pile of chile flakes, though the final effect, once you’ve slowly tossed all the elements together, hums rather than burns with heat. A Thai friend turned me on to the subtler, richer pleasures of san chan pad boo, noodles stained electric-orange from chile oil, riddled with crab meat and covered in a decidedly browned omelet. To vary things, the same friend suggested an herbed beef liver salad, sprinkled with a flurry of rice powder for nuttiness and finished with a dressing balanced by sugar and lime. I appreciated the prompt that there are depths to Sapp’s menu beyond noodles worth mining.
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