Mixing Bangkok With Bridle Bits

After years of living in cities across America, Saraya Van Holt and family chucked it all and moved to California’s rugged Eastern Sierra this year. They took over a country restaurant called the Western Kitchen, and now line-out-the-door crowds come to enjoy their chicken fried steak, biscuits with gravy and mee krob.

Mee what?

Saraya is a native of Bangkok, Thailand. She and her family have turned the Western Kitchen, on the main drag in Bishop (population 3,475), into the only Thai restaurant within a 325-mile stretch.

And her family is virtually the entire ethnic Thai population for hundreds of miles.

Since March, Saraya and company have been serving Thai food to a crowd--half locals, half tourists--on their way to ski at Mammoth Mountain or to fish the local lakes. Given the risk of novelty in small markets, Saraya also kept the restaurant’s previous all-American menu. So a typical family dinner at the Western Kitchen might include beef burgers and beef curry along with that mee krob (tiny fried noodles with ground meat). The traditional Thai steamed fish with ginger and lemongrass is made with decidedly local salmon fillets. Not in the mood for pancakes or omelets for breakfast? They’ll fix you a Thai egg dish, called kaiyasai.

Saraya has kept the previous cook and wait staff (although her daughter-in-law does most of the Thai cooking). At first Jerrie, the restaurant’s waitress, had to take customers’ orders by number because she couldn’t pronounce the Thai food names, “but she got OK with it,” Saraya says.

They’ve also kept the Western decor, making the Western Kitchen quite possibly the world’s only Thai restaurant decorated with cowboy hats, bridle bits, stirrups and horse wallpaper that would make any ranch hand feel at home.

With business booming, the restaurant has been able to afford a new roof and new carpeting.

The Western Kitchen has joined the Bishop Chamber of Commerce, and its menu appears in a catalog of fine local eateries.

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Bishop is about five hours due north of Los Angeles, four hours if your foot is heavy. In the Owens Valley, with the Sierra Nevada to the west and the White Mountains to the east, it is best known for a Mule Days festival every Memorial Day weekend, a Labor Day Rodeo, and its proximity to some of the best skiing, fishing and hiking in the West.

True to the Bishop heritage, Saraya and her family are pioneers in their own right, having more than doubled Inyo County’s ethnic Thai population. (The Los Angeles County population of Thai ancestry--some 19,000--exceeds the entire population of Inyo County by about 1,000.)

The Western Kitchen is the only Thai restaurant in the county (an area about as big as Maryland) and in neighboring Mono County as well. For the next Thai restaurant, you’ve got to go to Ridgecrest, some 130 miles to the south, or the outskirts of Reno, 195 miles north, if the road’s not closed due to snow.

Until now, Bishop’s culinary scene was dominated by Bubba’s Grill, Erik Schat’s Dutch Bakery and “you catch ‘em, we cook ‘em” joints. There are a couple of Italian and Mexican places and a Chinese restaurant, but Thai is, by all accounts, a welcome departure for this community.

“We never used to go out,” says Cynthia Siegel, a local ceramic artist who has visited Thailand, “but now we come here at least once a week. We want to make sure this place survives.”

Siegel especially appreciates the staff’s willingness to accommodate her husband’s kosher diet.

“Once, when one of our guests ordered shrimp, Saraya came out from the kitchen to make sure that was OK.”

Saraya Waiworakij met Bill Van Holt in the 1960s when he was stationed in Thailand with the U.S. Air Force. They married in 1969 and moved stateside. Bill became a real estate and insurance appraiser, and they lived in Sacramento, Oregon, Utah, Hawaii and, eventually, North San Diego County, until early this year.

Then Bill retired, and suggested the move to the Eastern Sierra. He’s long been an avid fisherman, and “every year we used to come here,” Saraya explains. “And he said, ‘Why don’t you see if there’s something you’d like to do?’ ”

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Of their reception here, Saraya says, “Everyone who comes in is very family.”

So how does the new family take to Thai food?

She says that customers on their first visit to the new Western Kitchen often look at the Thai menu but order off the Western menu. On their second visit, they try the Thai food, and then “they keep coming back,” from mountains as far as 70 miles away. “People come down to get away from the cold,” Saraya says.

“And also to shop at Kmart.”