Rules to Eat By

The third best thing I’ve had to eat this month was a mussel omelet, tossed with bean sprouts and fried until it was crunchy, which came from a Thai restaurant in Long Beach called Super Chicken. The second best thing, also from Super Chicken, was a Thai dessert that looked like little golfball halves, sweet, liquid demi-globes of coconut and sticky rice whose edges had been browned crisp. The best thing was probably Super Chicken’s chicken roti , a thick, griddle-baked wheat pancake, the size of a trade paperback, that had been split and filled with minced chicken that had been sauteed with sort of a brunoise of Thai vegetables--one of the finest sandwiches ever.

Please excuse my list-making. Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Super Chicken’s photocopied menu, studying the Super Chicken Rule of 10:

1. M.S.G. never use in cooking process.

2. Use very lean meat . . .

4. Fresh cooking every order, sitting in or to go . . .

There is nothing about Super Chicken to signal that it might be one of the most extraordinary Thai restaurants in the Southland. A few blocks from the river that separates North Long Beach from Compton, and a few steps from a Mexican-video store whose window features a painting of the biggest, meanest Bart Simpson you’ve ever seen, Super Chicken is the kind of strip-mall Thai place you’ve roared by a million times without a glance--a dingy-looking joint with a faded exterior, scraps of yellow cardboard in the window that advertise $2.99 lunch specials, and a jaundiced chicken on its sign. If you lived around here, you might call for take-out on nights when you didn’t feel like cooking.

But Super Chicken is possibly the best place to eat Bangkok-style street food on this side of the Pacific. The family that owns it is famous in the Thai community both for its griddled roti --filled with meat as an entree or wrapped around a sheen of condensed milk as dessert--and for its spicy yellow chicken, stained with turmeric and served with astoundingly garlicky yellow rice. The Super Chicken people are fixtures at Thai fairs, Thai parties, and the incredible food court that runs on weekends in the basement of the big Thai temple in North Hollywood.

. . . 6. We will add flavor to your life either which way you prefer.

There is something called “boat soup,” a tart, almost black broth piled high with crisply fried pigskin and strips of sauteed meat; and a murky, intense oxtail soup hot with bird peppers and filled with tender, meaty segments of tail. Duck soup is sweet and black, spiked with thick rice noodles, full of duck shreds, garnished with little cubes of congealed duck blood that are soft as aspic but whose flavor has a delicious, almost mineral snap. “Indian” curry noodles come in a sharply spicy coconut broth, fragrant with sour Thai herbs. A salad made from shredded green papaya is tart, smelter-hot and studded with crunchy bits of raw salted crab.

You can order off the burger-stand style menu board in back of the cash register, or off the printed menu--both seem to feature only the most ordinary Thai cooking, pad Thai and chicken coconut soup and beef panang. If you read Thai script, you can decipher the scrawled specials posted in the window. If you point at the steam table, you might end up with the garlic chicken, or with an ethereal catfish mousse with thick coconut milk. Most of the stuff on the regular menu is illustrated with photographs taped to the partition that separates the kitchen from the dining area. If you ask the owner to come out from behind the counter and decipher the dozen or so photos captioned in Thai instead of English, you’ll get the best food in the house.

Super Chicken, 3307 E. Artesia Blvd., North Long Beach, (213) 602-0342. No alcohol. Take-out and delivery. Open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, except Tuesday. Cash only. Dinner for two, food only, $6-$15.