Just Your Average Thai

For a long time, my friends and I liked to eat chicken panang at Arunee down on Vermont, a homely diner anchoring a block that seemed to be home to about half of the Thai restaurants in ‘70s Los Angeles. The food at Vim, a door or two down, may have been spicier, the flavors across town at Sukothai more focused, but Arunee was well-known for large portions, low prices and a house style, not too hot, that sang out with sugar and mellow garlic.

Arunee was a good destination for a stylish, cheap date. Cosmic-hippie types loved the place too, a large, bare room tricked out with wood paneling and tuck ‘n’ roll vinyl booths. Composer Carl Stone, famous for naming his electronic tone-poems after his favorite Asian restaurants, titled one of his best compositions “Arunee.”

Because of its location in a large Central American neighborhood, Arunee has always attracted a big Latino crowd too. In fact, the spicy seafood soup tastes more like a Thai-inflected sopa de siete mares than it does like its equivalent at Chan Dara, and some of the waitresses are fluent in Thai, English and Spanish.

When the second wave of Thai restaurants hit, the Hollywood ones that stayed open til 4 in the morning, we still went to Arunee for pepper-garlic shrimp, the crisply fried fish cakes called tod mun and hot-sour chicken soup. We continued to go to Arunee as suburban-style Thai places opened, hip Thai places, and even Thai places that specialized in the food of a particular Thai region. Arunee’s garlicky-sweet crab noodles, shot through with scallions, plenty of crab meat and enough chile to raise welts on your tongue, were pretty hard to stay away from. We went because we’d always gone, because the thin, barky taste of Arunee’s chicken-coconut soup was entwined with memory and desire, the remnants of hungers fulfilled. And there was always the hope of scoring an order of deep-fried corn cakes, a dish that has been on the menu as long as I can remember, but which the restaurant never seems to have.

In the last couple of years, my friends have tended toward the stronger, earthier flavors of more “authentic” Thai restaurants, where you don’t necessarily find stir-fries made with tiny, canned ears of corn, and they more or less stopped going to Arunee--there are too many better places to eat now, too many places with grilled lemon-glass sausages, and perfect roti , and swell catfish larb, even if too many of them seem to be located in Norwalk or Buena Park.

But Arunee is still the source of simple pleasures--crunchy, whole deep-fried pompano sauced with an intensely garlicky mushroom sautee or a mass of shredded pork with ginger; good fried fishcake; a mussel-beansprout omelet that turns out to be a crunchy taro omelet with some mussels and beansprouts tossed on the side. There is a fine grilled-shrimp salad, dressed with lime and dusted with minced chiles and raw garlic. Though most of the stir-fries seem limp and greasy, the hot-sour chicken soup is still herbal and finely balanced. The beer is good and cold.

Arunee Restaurant, 853 S. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 385-6653. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Beer and wine. Cash only. Take-out. Lot parking in rear. Dinner for two, food only, $12-$20.