There’s something about Thai cuisine that is warm and welcoming.
Perhaps it’s the fire that bird’s eye chili brings to a dish, or maybe the bold punchiness of tom yum soup.
My colleague and food critic Bill Addison referred to Thai as “a pillar cuisine of Los Angeles.”
And why not?
The city boasts the world’s largest Thai population outside of Thailand. Those who open restaurants open our palates to a diverse range of flavors and sensations from their micro-regional cooking styles.
Addison is wary of using the term “best.” Instead, he crafted a list of his 15 favorite Thai restaurants in Los Angeles. Here, we’ll highlight a handful of those choices, in Addison’s own words.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)
Anajak Thai (Sherman Oaks)
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 Pichetrungsi 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, with Justin’s creative individualism — specifically his Thai Taco Tuesday phenomenon.
That’s 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. Add what has become one of L.A.’s great wine lists, and the restaurant has catapulted 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.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Ayara Thai (Westchester)
Owner 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.
(Silvia Razgova / For The Times)
Holy Basil (Atwater Village)
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.
If you enjoyed those selections, check out the full list here. Happy dining.
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