If your evening plans involve bars in Hollywood or Los Feliz, it’s easy to cruise a few miles down Hollywood Blvd toward one of Los Angeles' great culinary treasures: Thai Town. While Harvard & Stone is right in the middle, this neighborhood is also convenient to bars like the Library Bar and Spare Room in the Roosevelt Hotel to the west and La Descarga to the south.
Dinner
While must drunks find their way to Thai Town for food after the bars have closed, there are a few options for grabbing dinner in Thai Town as well. Be sure to watch the spice level: there’s spicy, then there’s authentic Thai spicy.
Jitlada
You can’t say the word Thai spicy without mentioning Jitlada. While the restaurant’s popularity has been as high as ever, the service can suffer as a result of it. That being said, Jitlada offers a Southern-style Thai food, which owes a lot of influence from the Muslim population in that part of the country. The dish that best typifies Jitlada is the fried beef, coated in dark curry powder and whose spiciness can reach thermonuclear levels of heat. Other regional dishes include whole deep-fried seabass with generous heaps of turmeric. Finally, more recognizable dishes are also available here, such as papaya salad (raw blue crab optional).
Pa Ord
The waitlist (and parking lot!) at Jitlada can be unbearable sometimes, but luckily, just one block west, is one of Thai Town’s best noodle joints. Pa Ord boasts a variety of noodle soups with your choice of noodle width, such as the famous “boat” noodles. Other great menu items include their Isaan-style grilled sausage.
Late Night
Many places in Thai Town are open late night, but really there are only two worth mentioning. Both are open until 3am and cater to the late night post-Hollywood nightclub crowd. If you ever find yourself outside of Harvard & Stone, both are nearby a block and a half away, delicious and dirt cheap. Where to go will depend on your mood.
Sanamluang
Sanamluang’s best dishes tend to be their noodles, of which their menu has plenty. Most of the noodle dishes will be brothy like the beef noodles shown below. But sometimes the noodles can be ordered “dry”, meaning without broth, such as the General’s Noodles. Recently, Sanamluang began to expand their menu to include an awesome beef jerky served with a spicy dipping sauce.
Ruen Pair
Rather than noodles, the best items on Ruen Pair’s menu are their rice dishes. Steamed white rice topped with your choice of stewed or BBQ pork, or perhaps duck. If you can’t choose, go for the Cha Po combination which uses all of them. Other stellar dishes here include their soups and apps such as their rendition of Isaan-style sausage. Also worth seeking out are their spicy, vinegary Thai “salads” which tend to be closer to a ceviche than a Western-style salad. Their fried egg salad is a surprising (and spicy) treat.
The Next Morning
If you find yourself in Thai Town looking for an early start to the day, there’s one noteworthy stop. This restaurant was featured in the Los Angeles episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations which featured Bourdain slurping noodles with one of my favorite food bloggers. Their version of boat noodles remain my local standard, but also exceptional are the dishes shown below: the Thai fried rice with sausage and a more run of the mill beef soup.
Sapp Coffee Shop
Google Map for Sapp Coffee Shop
Thai Town offers some excellent and unique places to grab a bite before a night of boozing, but is particularly invaluable to putting food in your stomach afterwards.
