Strictly Thai

Chalerm Krung is a tiny cafe in the eastern reaches of Hollywood, a few sticky tables, a sleek neon sign, a television in the corner so you can watch Sally Jessy Raphael over lunch. There isn’t what you’d call a whole lot of decor in here, maybe a couple of Arabic inspirational plaques and a few menu cards in sprawling Thai script, plus a stack or two of Thai magazines over in a corner. Today, Sally Jessy is discussing the topic of “Men Who Won’t Let Their Wives Wear Bikinis.”

Chalerm Krung, which calls itself the only Thai Muslim restaurant in Los Angeles, occupies a storefront once home to a scruffily anonymous Thai joint and before that an even scruffier Indian one. Bumper stickers in the restaurant’s parking lot urge you to Read Quran. The restaurant’s clientele sometimes seems almost equally divided between East Asian people who come for exotic Thai cooking and Muslims from other cultures who come for exotic food that conforms to strict Islamic dietary laws. Do not even think of asking for a pork dish (forbidden) or a taboo bottle of beer; they are not on the menu in any case.

Muslim Thai cooking, mostly practiced in the jungly southern tail of Thailand where it feathers into the Malay Peninsula, involves lots of coconut milk, tamarind, exotic spices, curries everywhere, and is often closer to Indian--or Middle Eastern--food than to anything you might think of as Thai. In their original incarnations, Muslim Thai curries are famous for their white-hot dose of chile fire, perhaps the hottest food to be found in all Thailand--and by inference, the world.

At Chalerm Krung, the terrific grilled beef satay , encrusted in spice, reveals its familial similarity to the kebabs of, say, Morocco, and the curries are even more delicious ladled over the crisp, Indian-style griddle bread paratha than they are over plain white rice.

The restaurant has a more or less standard Thai menu, absent the obvious offenders, and it is possible to have a decent grilled-beef salad, a fine bowl of chicken-coconut soup, a dependable, if oversweetened, deep-fried pomfret fish sauced with ginger and Thai mushrooms. (Caveat: the cooking can be inconsistent.) The heart of the menu, though, is the section headed only by the notation ahang Islam --Islamic food--in Thai letters, which is where you will find almost every specialty of the place.

Biryani is a Thai version of the North Indian dish, yellow, turmeric-stained rice, fragrant with herbs, that is topped with golden shreds of fried onion, and conceals a (rather mushy) piece or two of chicken that has baked in the rice. With it is served a strange, sweet syrup that can be mixed with the rice as a condiment. Oxtail soup is clear and concentrated, intensely beefy. Noodle curry is quite like the bright yellow noodle curries of Burma, soft pasta in a soupy sauce, garnished with bits of fat beef and wedges of hard-boiled egg, smartly flavored with tamarind and creamy with coconut, not a low-calorie dish but a satisfying one.

The three Muslim curries here--the standard Thai green curry masaman , well done here; the yellow, complex karee and the fiery-hot kuruma --are all great, the kind of sauces you end up sopping out of the serving bowls when you think nobody’s looking, even if the curries themselves are tastier than the chicken or beef that is cooked in them. To finish, there is “Islamic tea,” which turns out to be an unsweetened version of our old Indian friend masala tea, thickened with milk and spiced with cardamom, which the initiated--not me--drink out of saucers.

Chalerm Krung Thai Muslim Restaurant

5101 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (213) 660-1178. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. No alcohol. Cash only. Lot parking in rear (off Normandie Avenue). Dinner for two, food only, $8-$15.