Night at Dee Prom

Dee Prom might be the happiest place in Los Angeles, an elegant Thai nightclub in the heart of ethnic Hollywood, near tango clubs and Armenian bakeries and Romanian groceries, next door to a German delicatessen, kitty-corner from the piquantly named Jumbo’s Clown Room. On Dee Prom’s tiny stage, a slick, attractive band--including up to four Thai women in short cocktail dresses--bounces through Thai pop songs that sound like “She Blinded Me With Science” or “Superfreak,” but aren’t, all squooshy synthesizer sound and close female harmonies. A big Happy Birthday sign is permanently affixed to a back wall. After 10 o’clock on weekends, the restaurant fills up with Thai couples, and the parking lot overflows with triple-parked cars. A stack of song-request slips sits on each table hard by the chile sauce. Dee Prom is a swell place for a party.

With the music, you drink, mostly strong Singha beer, but also Michelob, Heineken and glasses of white wine. And with the drinks, you snack--on crisp-skinned Thai sausages hot from the grill, pungent with lemon grass and served with fried peanuts and slices of fresh ginger; on green-papaya salad, som - tom , in which the unripe fruit is shredded into a sort of crunchy slaw, tart, hot and powerfully flavored with dried shrimp; on fried salted beef, a swell sort of Thai beef jerky that is served with a smokey chile dip. Unlike their American equivalents, Thai nightclubs tend to have great food, and Dee Prom may well be the best Thai restaurant in Hollywood.

There is the peppery Bangkok-style vegetable soup kaeng lieng , spiked with squash, with a clear, intriguingly bitter flavor, and a powerfully tart version of the popular hot-sour chicken soup tom yum gai . There are good salads, dressed with chile, herbs and lime: barbecued duck salad, barbecued beef salad, barbecued shrimp salad. There is a very fine dish of crunchy fried belly pork sauteed with tons of garlic and bitter greens. Lots of people come in for the usual Thai stuff: chicken-coconut soup, pork sate , spicy beef panang . But as with a lot of Thai places, most of the unusual stuff is listed in Thai on the back of the menu, and as with a lot of Thai places, the unusual stuff is pretty much the best stuff to get. It would be possible to have dinner here a dozen times without discovering what most of the people in the restaurant are actually eating.

(In fact, every time I asked for a recommendation, even after ordering several items from the Thai-only page of the menu, the waitress suggested something on the order of candy-sweet mee krob noodles or fried beef with chile and garlic, which were just OK.) There is a fantastic, crunchy salad called something like yaam-yaam made with fish that has been shredded and fried until it looks like a mound of fish Rice Krispies, dressed with chile and lime, that could become as popular as pad Thai if it were on every Americanized Thai menu. Pla pae cha involves a chafing dish in the shape of a big, silvery fish, with a half-inch of sour tamarind broth at the bottom, a whole fish, and a pile of steamed cabbage and celery leaves--the fish itself is fresh and sweet-tasting enough, but the strong tamarind broth served on the side, flavored with celery and chiles, is extraordinary.

Haw mok ta le , an aluminum-foil puff that looks pretty much like a package of Jiffy Pop, splits open to reveal crab and fish and clams steamed in a spicy coconut-milk mousse, like a sweet curried seafood dream. Kaeng paa , sometimes translated as “jungle curry,” is a thin, fearsomely spicy bamboo-shoot curry that can be served with pork or chicken. Phad phed is another exotic curry, a delicious mound of frog parts fried with tiny, pea-size eggplants--amphibious delight!--that is subtly flavored under all that chile. Dee Prom supposedly also serves phad phed made with Thai wild pig, but I’ve never been able to get a plate. Actually, after five chilified courses and a few bottles of Singha, you might begin to feel like a Thai wild pig yourself.

* Dee Prom Thai Cuisine

5132 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (213) 662-1367. Open Monday, Tuesday and Thursday 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., Friday through Sunday 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. Beer and wine. Takeout. Guarded lot parking. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $15-$25.