Spotlight on regional dishes

Northern Thai: Khao Sawy

You can’t walk more than a few feet in Thailand’s largest northern city, Chiang Mai, without running into a place selling khao sawy. Soft, wide egg noodles are suspended in a creamy coconut milk broth, then more noodles -- deep fried and crunchy -- are heaped on top. Alongside come tiny saucers of hot roasted chile oil, chopped shallot, pickled greens and fresh lime. The dish, which came south via Burma with Muslim traders from Yunnan, China, isn’t easy to find. It may escape notice -- even at northern-style restaurants. On Spicy BBQ Restaurant’s menu, for example, the dish is simply called “egg noodles in northern Thai curry.”

Isaan: “Naked Shrimp”Many Angelenos may have been introduced to this dish by way of the popular Thai restaurant Chan Dara, where it’s grilled shrimp in a salad. But “naked shrimp” in the Isaan region of Thailand is shrimp plucked from local rivers, served raw out of the shell and dressed with just dry chile and lime. Eat them sashimi-style, or use your fingers to pick them up with tiny balls of sticky rice.

Thai-Lao: Nuah SavanhDriving along Isaan and northern roads, you see vendors selling their meat dried to various stages of leatheriness. You can buy it aged one, two, three or more days. Just about every Thai-Lao restaurant prepares dried meat. At Dee Dee Thai-Lao restaurant in Anaheim, the paper-thin dried beef, having been soaked in a sweet garlicky marinade, is cut into slabs slightly larger than playing cards. It gets a light sprinkling of sesame seeds before being deep-fried. It’s addictive nibble food. You break off little chips and dip them in the house special sauce, a devilish mixture of dried red chiles and tomato sauce.

Southern Thai: Khao YamA complex, nuanced, gorgeous toss of ingredients that often is described as “rice salad,” this is perhaps southern Thailand’s most popular comfort food. Garnishes can include peanuts, toasted coconut shreds, shallots, julienned kafir lime leaves, chiles and tiny dried shrimp; green mango, carrots and other vegetables are arranged over jasmine rice. It all gets tossed with a sauce that includes budu, fermented anchovies.