Where the Crumbs Are Golden

When I ordered fried catfish salad in Bangkok, I got a tangy green mango salad sprinkled with crunchy golden crumbs. The crumbs were the fried catfish, and the combination with the cool salad was remarkable.

I’ve found one version of this dish in Los Angeles that compares, at the Palms Thai Restaurant in Hollywood. It’s wonderful.

And so was everything I had along with it. There was thin-sliced barbecued beef flavored with lime juice and more raw garlic than I’ve ever seen outside a Korean restaurant. Chicken in green curry was delightfully buried under crisp, extra-large basil leaves.

Whatever is ready first appears first, so what should have been the appetizer arrived well into the meal. This was fried, crumb-coated slices of sourish Thai sausage, for snacking on with roasted peanuts and a wedge of raw cabbage--a perfect accompaniment to Thai beer. But the dinner had actually started with mint noodles: sweet, very spicy, flat rice noodles. (The term “mint” is used loosely here. The herb was actually basil.)

The Palms is a large, airy, vaguely tropical room with long rows of tables set with blue and white china. It fronts a Hollywood mall full of Thai food sources. Behind it is a Thai sweets shop; beyond that, another Thai restaurant and across the parking lot a Thai rice soup place.

It’s not a new restaurant, but it has changed management and the menu has been reworked. One new feature is a section titled “the wild things.” The wildest it gets is venison, frog, raw clam salad and dishes that are wildly spicy, such as hen in “jungle curry” (“super ultimate hot and spicy”).

In Thailand, curries sometimes contain hauntingly aromatic sprigs of fresh green peppercorns. The Palms adds these little branches to deer in a spicy sauce. Although the peppercorns come from a jar, the effect is still nice.

The beef jerky is so freshly fried it almost burns your fingers as you pull it apart--and this is finger food, so don’t labor over it with chopsticks or the forks and big spoons Thais use at the table. The jerky is good by itself but better dipped in a spicy dried chile dipping sauce. But forget the pork jerky. It’s musty-tasting and dotted with unattractive yellow fat.

I don’t know why seafood soup is listed among “the wild things,” except that the broth is very spicy--and also oddly sweet. The seafood, arranged on a plate lined with raw cabbage slices, consists of fish, squid, shrimp and sticks of imitation crab (in my opinion, they ought to be replaced by real seafood). You cook these in the broth, which bubbles away in a small clay pot set over a brazier of hot coals, then dip the pieces in a green sauce that is very hot and also markedly sweet.

A better choice is steamed whole trout topped with vegetables and also bubbling in broth. The fish is sweet and delicate. Dip it in a spicy, salty fish sauce for great taste.

Two dishes not to miss here are Palms Thai combo rice and barbecued pork with spicy sauce. Unlike the jerky, this pork is full of flavor and the sauce, called jaow, adds still more. It’s a typical northeast-Thai-style barbecue sauce. The traditional components include tamarind, fish sauce, lime juice and chiles.

The rice is fried with shrimp paste, then covered with a kaleidoscopic array of sweet, salty, crunchy, soft and spicy things, including golden omelet slices, tiny dried shrimp fried crisp, sliced sweet Chinese sausage, hot fresh Thai chiles, red onion slices, green apple slices (standing in for green mango when it’s not available), carrot shreds and pork floss, a sweet fluff of shredded pork that looks light enough to float away.

Deep-fried chunks of trout come with a bowl of “mango sauce”--better described as shredded green mangoes (again, apple may be substituting) combined with cashew nuts and sweet and spicy seasonings. The restaurant makes pad Thai in two styles, mild and spicy. The first represents central Thailand, the second is northern style and both are very good.

The Palms’ version of tod mun, the fried fish cakes that contain shreds of kafir lime leaf and tiny long bean slices, is routine. Its duck curry is tasty, but there’s only a little meat amid rather a lot of sweet orange sauce and canned pineapple.

Along with Thai tea and beer, the Palms serves icy sweet brown longan juice and a tall glass of the pinkest drink you will ever see. It’s made with soda and red sala syrup that you can buy in the Thai supermarket next door.

Several nights a week, there is live entertainment. The headliner is Kavee Thongprecha, the Thai Elvis. Unlike other Elvis impersonators, Thongprecha gives a low-key performance: no satiny costume, bushy sideburns or gyrating hips, just a dark business suit with spangles under the collar and stripes down the legs and a voice that is uncannily like that of Elvis.

BE THERE

Palms Thai Restaurant, 5273 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 462-5073. Open 11 a.m. to midnight Monday through Thursday, 11 to 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday. Beer and wine. Parking lot. All major credit cards ($15 minimum). Dinner for two, food only, $15 to $30.

What to Get: Crispy catfish with mango salad, Palms Thai sausage, deer with green peppercorns in spicy sauce, barbecued pork with spicy sauce, beef jerky, barbecued beef with lime and garlic, Thai combo rice, beef jerky, pad Thai.