cuisine

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.

The week’s biggest stories

(Carlin Stiehl/For the Times)

Palisades fire and other blazes

Trump administration policies and reactions

Crime, courts and policing

More big stories

This week’s must-reads

More great reads

For your weekend

(Illustrations by Lindsey Made This; photograph by Kevin Winter / Getty Images)

Going out

Staying in

L.A. Affairs

Get wrapped up in tantalizing stories about dating, relationships and marriage.

Have a great weekend, from the Essential California team

Jim Rainey, staff writer
Andrew J. Campa, reporter
Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editor
Karim Doumar, head of newsletters
Diamy Wang, homepage intern
Izzy Nunes, audience intern

How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to [email protected]. Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on latimes.com.

Through the glassed-in entrance of Citizen Public Market in Culver City, up its short flight of stairs, past scents of barbecue coming from the Smokey Chance stand and chefs wrapping dry-aged fish into handrolls at Uoichiba, I turn a sharp right and reach the back of the food hall. Kiano Moju stands at an island behind an L-shaped counter. She’s calling out orders: “Two chicken and a beef, please. And I’m still waiting on a shrimp?”

Moju is the author of “AfriCali,” one of the Food team’s favorite cookbooks of 2024, in which she grafts the East African and West African flavors of her heritage with an approach to cooking she learned growing up in the Bay Area. In her hands, bacon, avocado and tomato jam fill an omelet rolled into a chapati in the Ugandan street food called rolex, and dirty chai (jolted with a shot of espresso) complicates the classic charms of tiramisu.

Now Moju has given herself a new job title: restaurateur.

Jikoni, which means “kitchen” in Swahili, is the name of her pop-up operating inside the market from Wednesday to Sunday throughout summer. Dishes derive from recipes in “AfriCali.” She’s structured the menu around riffs on street-food kebabs she remembers from coastal Kenya, where she spent summers growing up.

In the book she writes, “My first time eating mishkaki was in the northern part of Mombasa, in a local eatery where the meat hits your table within seconds of it being pulled off the charcoal grill. The accompaniments are simple because the meat is the star.”

A crowd gathers to order at Jikoni, Kiano Moju’s summertime pop-up inside Citizen Public Market in Culver City.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

As one example of her adaptive process: In “AfriCali,” she considers how to rework chicken and chips, a fast food popular in Nairobi that pairs flash-fried chicken and fries with poussin sauce made of chile-spiced butter and lemon juice. For the cookbook version, she rubs chicken with garlic and dried oregano before roasting it and then brushing the bird with poussin sauce right before serving.

At Jikoni, she grills chicken thighs threaded on skewers. The buttery sauce brings the character, with smoked paprika and Kashmiri chile powder (which has its own berry-like smokiness), a base of ginger and garlic and lemon juice’s lifting tartness. Similarly, garlicky butterflied shrimp soak in peri-peri butter, fragrant with basil, parsley and cilantro and punched with sweet paprika and cayenne pepper.

“Suya” is a Nigerian word for skewers typically coated with yaji, a peppery spice blend that includes crushed peanuts and burns with cayenne and cardamom. Moju thoroughly coats lamb chops with yaji and rosemary; the meat can stand up to the barrage.

A mix of mishkaki (skewered meats) and sides at Jikoni in Citizen Public Market, including egusi and kale in the center.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Each mishkaki variation comes with two sides. Among them: Moju’s simplified variation on egusi, the Nigerian stew thickened with ground melon seeds, which she renders far less soupy paired with kale. She seasons the dish with curry powder and, crucially, ground crayfish for its specific umami. A soothing recipe in “AfriCali” for chickpeas simmered in coconut sauce here becomes a foil for butter beans: They half-melt into coconut milk curried with garam masala and cumin seeds and tinted with turmeric.

Those are my two favorites, though I’d also encourage an extra side of basmati rice to sop up a meal’s mingled sauces. And then dessert: a riff on Key lime pie with the addition of fresh passion fruit and gingersnaps for the crust.

Welcome flavors, smart approach

Jikoni is a thoroughly heartening endeavor. Minus our wealth of Ethiopian restaurants, Los Angeles has too few showcases for the cuisines of Africa; how rich to have a glimpse into contrasting tastes of two of the continent’s coastal cultures on one succinct menu. And given the far more common path of chef to cookbook author, it’s fun to see how Moju and her crew (which frequently includes her mother, Katano Kasaine) acclimate her recipes to the rhythms of restaurant-style service. Interior design is also among her talents: Notice the beautifully curated shelves behind the ordering counter, arranged with African pottery and art and cookbooks written on a breadth of cuisines across Africa and its diasporas, that brings to mind the dining room of Two Hommés in Inglewood that she helped reenvision.

Kiano Moju pictured in the Los Angeles Times test kitchen, preparing pumpkin chapati for an episode of “Chef That!”

(Robert Hanashiro / For The Times)

Return for Swahili-style biriyani

In June, as a practice run for Jikoni, Moju settled into the market stand by serving Swahili-style biriyani, a Kenyan variation in which rice and saucy spiced meat (short ribs, in this case) are cooked separately and combined on the plate with fried onions and rounds of green chile. I heard glowing reports about the biriyani but missed its early run.

Good news: Many people have asked for it, so Moju has said she’ll be re-creating the dish as a recurring Sunday night special. See you there.

Jikoni at Citizen Public Market, 9355 Culver Blvd., Culver City, jikoni.co

Also …

• Want to know where to eat right now in Los Angeles? Danielle Dorsey recaps the Food team’s month of reporting and restaurant recommendations.
• Cole’s French Dip announced in early July that it would be closing on Aug. 2. Karla Marie Sanford reports that, after a surge in business after the announcement, the restaurant will delay its closure by 45 days.
• Jenn Harris reflects on her grandmother, Phyllis Harris, who died on July 17 at 91, and the profound ways she inspired Jenn’s career path.

  

  Phyllis Harris with two granddaughters at a dim sum restaurant in Los Angeles.

  (Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times )

• Stephanie Breijo writes about the legacy of Bill Elwell, the colorful owner-operator of Van Nuys burger stand Bill’s Burgers, who died on July 21 at age 98.
• Gustavo Arellano has the scoop on a new iteration of Carlos Salgado’s Taco María, the lauded Costa Mesa restaurant that closed in June 2023. The location of his new place, named La Sirena? Wisconsin.

In a coffee city like Los Angeles, it’s no surprise that many coffee shops, teahouses and cafes take creativity to the next level. The sweet syrups and aesthetic latte art that marked our entry into customizable coffee culture were only the beginning — springboards for today’s caffeine scene where different flavors of fluffy cream tops and unique toppings, from sugar rims to cob-shaped corn ice cream, draw crowds to shops across the city.

Here, dramatic drinks take inspiration from a wealth of cultures and cuisines, from East Asian cafes and bubble tea shops where add-ons are the star to third-wave coffee shops highlighting flavors from around the world.

“We wanted something on the menu that was kind of a destination drink,” said Max Rand, the owner of Good Friend, a coffee shop that opened in East Hollywood last year. “That’s become a really popular thing in L.A. especially: something that people will go out of their way for, will drive across town for. It has to be interesting enough for someone to go out of their way to try it.”

Extravagant drinks aren’t always a hit — too many add-ons and the delicately bitter flavor of matcha disappears. Adding whipped cream and other flourishes can muddle the tasting notes that coffee roasters work so hard to highlight. Finding the sweet spot is difficult.

Achieving that balance — high-quality ingredients and processes complemented by unique flavors and presentation — is what makes a baroque beverage a winner. From coffee infused with yuzu to milky mango topped with matcha mousse, these are our favorite over-the-top drinks that taste just as good as they look.