A Palace in Its Own Way

What better way to sample Thai food than to prowl the food stalls in a Bangkok marketplace?

The obvious catch is that you may not be planning a journey to Bangkok. But there is a closer alternative: Thai Seafood on Hollywood Boulevard.

Pranee Chayasit and her brother, Songklote Surachay, once cooked in Rachawat market, located near the Grand Palace in Bangkok. Now they’re turning out great egg rolls, smooth curries, interesting noodle soups and plenty of seafood in this cubbyhole of a restaurant.

The table nearest the door is so small that you may wind up stashing platters on chairs if you order very much. And you might as well order enough to get the egg rolls or Thai iced tea that come free with a $15 minimum purchase. (The other four tables are large enough to handle the abundance of food this outlay brings.)

The restaurant offers terrific egg rolls, stuffed with cabbage, carrot, celery and bean threads. These are freshly fried, so they’re crisp and so hot they may burn your mouth.

The fish cakes (tod man pla) are made of pulverized red snapper mixed with red curry paste that is blended at the restaurant, bits of long bean and fragrant kaffir lime leaf. They come with a sauce-salad of diced cucumber and tomato in sweet-sour sauce, topped with sesame seeds.

My other favorite fish dish, fried mussels (hoi tod), are not coated with batter but encased in a crisp pancake of egg and rice flour. The whole thing is laid over bean sprouts, topped with cilantro and accompanied by Sriracha sauce doctored to counteract its intense heat.

Mixed seafood over noodles (lard nar talay) is all right too. The crab may be imitation, but the squid, scallops and shrimp are real, and the wide rice noodles are stir-fried in a wok hot enough to char them. Order this with Chinese broccoli, not American broccoli; the Chinese vegetable has a slight bitterness that fits well with the sweet seafood. The sauce is thickened with cornstarch, a giveaway that this is a Thai-Chinese dish.

Steamed rainbow trout, topped with ginger shreds, black mushrooms and green onions, is a bargain at $7.50 for a big fish. It’s nicely cooked so that the meat falls cleanly away from the bones, and it’s a good choice if someone in your group can’t eat spicy food. Thai Seafood’s sweet, creamy red curry sauce is also mild; shrimp is very nice cooked this way.

The menu lists the usual Thai restaurant dishes, but there’s a separate Thai-language menu with specials worth investigating. One of these is boat noodles (kwayteow reua), which will start you dreaming that you are floating on the klongs of Bangkok, ordering lunch from a water-borne vendor. The dark broth, colored and sweetened with black sweet soy sauce, is hauntingly seasoned with star anise and cinnamon. Along with linguine-shaped rice noodles, the bowl contains shrimp, bean sprouts, cilantro, green onion and fried garlic.

Kway chob is normally made with pig’s innards. I asked for seafood instead and got a hefty soup of squid, scallops, fried tofu, shrimp and very wide rice noodles--some of which had rolled into cylinders that looked like squid.

Yentafo, a dish of broad rice noodles, is flavored with fermented bean sauce, a taste not everyone can handle. It also contains crunchy white fungus, fried tofu, fish balls, squid and either spinach or the spinach-like leaves of water convolvulus (or some of each).

On Fridays and weekends, noodle soup prices are reduced to $2.99, and the restaurant goes slightly upscale by bringing in a waitress. One Friday, the counter displayed a tray of translucent dumplings, some filled with taro mixed with ground dried shrimp, others with chives. These were delicious dunked in black sweet soy sauce laced with jalapenos.

The waitress brings a bowl of fish sauce with sliced green chiles to add to crab-fried rice, as is the Thai custom. Tasting like old-fashioned Chinese restaurant rice, this dish contained two kinds of crab: the real thing mixed with the rice, the imitation on top. Fried rice with Chinese broccoli comes topped with crispy pork--or seafood, if you prefer. And a weekend special is kao man gai--steamed or fried chicken served with gai--steamed or fried chicken served with rice and a bowl of chicken broth.

Thai Seafood is located on the western fringes of Hollywood’s Thai neighborhood, just east of the Hollywood Boulevard exit of the Hollywood Freeway. It’s one of three Thai restaurants crammed together at the end of a block. Watch closely or you might pass it by, it’s that tiny.

BE THERE

Thai Seafood, 5615 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles; (213) 462-7678 or 461-7053. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Takes Visa and MasterCard with a minimum order of $10 or cash, no checks. Takeout. Street parking. Dinner for two, food only, $13 to $18; combination lunches, $4.50.

What to get: Spring rolls, fish cakes, fried mussels, boat noodles.