Monkgorn Kawasai’s Searingly Hot Thai Food Is Flavorful, But Not for the Meek

There are a million Thai restaurants in the naked city--fragrant, cool places with glass-topped tables, lemon in the ice water and discreet Buddhist shrines mounted high on their rear walls.

Monkgorn Kawasai was at one time perhaps the most celebrated of local Thai chefs. The Gault-Millau guide awarded Thai Gourmet in Northridge, where he used to cook, a rating higher than that of any other ethnic restaurant and equal to that of Spago. Gourmet magazine reviewed Thai Gourmet in worshipful terms, and Kawasai was profiled in The Times.

A few years ago, Kawasai opened his own restaurant, Rama Thai Cuisine, an elegant little place plunked into a Van Nuys mini-mall with a 7-Eleven and a Korean noodle shop called something like Great Soup House, across from a chain fish house and down the road from the General Motors plant.

For some reason--location, name, extremely hot food--Rama Thai never quite attracted the following of the other restaurant. Though it got a couple of good reviews and foodies seemed to know about the place, Kawasai never achieved the easy celebrity of, say, Tommy Tang. Pity.

Kawasai is from northeastern Thailand, and his cooking--light, fresh, searingly hot--owes more to the exotic cuisine of Laos than does the Malaysian-inflected Bangkok cooking that you might be sick of by now, though the usual sate , pad thai , mee grob stuff is on the menu, too, and is prepared masterfully well. Try sarong instead, egg noodles crisp as porcupine quills bristling from deep-fried chicken-pork meatballs, the richness cut by a thick sweet and sour dip like a Cantonese duck sauce, or unusually spiced deep-fried chicken wings that are stuffed with savory ground pork and served with a similar dip.

Rama Thai’s hotness is not the blind flinging of chiles you might have experienced at other Thai restaurants, but a clear, stinging heat that focuses the other flavors in a given dish and induces a marvelous sort of calm midway through the meal, if you can get over the sensation of having swallowed an acetylene torch. (They’ll moderate the chile on request.)

Salads are especially fiery: nam sod , which is a salad of ground, cooked pork laced with red onion, lemon juice, roasted peanuts, strips of ginger and lots of chile; kai nam toke , a dish of grilled chicken tossed with mint leaves, lemon juice and roasted rice powder that you would be happy to see for three times the price at a restaurant devoted to nouvelle cuisine; a larb that feels like a mouthful of molten brimstone but tastes angelic; a wonderful salad of shredded carrots laden with shrimp and garlic that is nothing like the carrot salad you used to avoid at church picnics.

Soups are the usual things, though the chicken-coconut soup is thinner and more delicate than the fragrant syrups you’ve probably encountered at Americanized Thai restaurants, and the po tak , laden with squid, clams, mussels and fish, is flavored with a dozen herbs that Julia Child couldn’t identify on a bet. The standard Thai stir-fries--pork with garlic, beef with mint and chili, shrimp with baby corn--are all accurately enough prepared, but no more epiphanic than their Hollywood or Ventura Boulevard equivalents: Rama Thai offers so much more.

If you call in advance, you can get steamed artichokes slathered with thick coconut milk and stuffed with a savory mixture of ground pork and shrimp that you suspect artichokes might stuff themselves with given another billion or so years to evolve; jumbo clams can be stuffed with more or less the same thing. Catfish, cut into cross sections on the bias as if they were logs, are fried until crispy as fritters, then sauced with a profound tincture of chile and garlic. “Savory shrimp,” sauteed without oil, are sauced with a sweet mixture of diced fruit and--natch--chile that is perfectly set off by the woody scent of roasted cashews.

If you still have room, Kawasai’s homemade coconut ice cream laced with jackfruit is a perfect thing after a searing meal.

Rama Thai, 7030 Van Nuys Blvd., Van Nuys (818) 782-0140. Lunch Mondays-Fridays, dinner nightly. Takeout and delivery. Lot parking. No alcohol. No checks accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $12-$20.