Authoritative Thai, with a backbeat
We’d painstakingly worked our way through Ban Phai’s specials menu, my Thai friends doing the translating and me doing the nodding.
Everything sounded wonderful, with some dishes sounding unlike anything I’d had at your typical Thai restaurant.
Then the food started coming, and it was like opening presents. Right away we were awed by a silvery lotus that appeared at our table. It was foil folded gracefully around seafood that had been steamed with coconut milk and curry paste. The mixture included mussels, squid, shrimp, fish and crab.
Thais can often present food with drama. But Ban Phai, on a strip of Sunset Boulevard not far from Thai Town, is different. There’s little in the way of decor, and most customers come after 9 p.m., when the live Thai country music or karaoke starts.
The real show, though, comes as you eat the dishes -- not because of how they’re presented, but because of how they taste. Many are excellently prepared with true Thai flavor.
One Saturday at dinnertime, as my friends and I had the place to ourselves, we started with grilled beef balls in a very hot, sweet red sauce that looked oddly like strawberry sauce. You can see skewers of meatballs like these grilling at street stalls in Thailand. The meat is ground as fine as paste.
Then came tiny pieces of crisp fried quail, seasoned with soy sauce, sugar and bits of garlic, forming a circle around pineapple chunks -- finger food to go with drinks.
Instead of the usual hot and spicy shrimp soup (tom yum goong), we had a similar one made with the same broth and lemongrass, but with a surprise -- fish roe -- little white sacks that burst open revealing roe as tiny as grains of sand.
We asked for medium seasoning, but “medium” can be pretty hot at this restaurant, as, for instance, in fried catfish with curry paste. My friends said they loved this dish because the curry paste tasted homemade.
Basil crispy pork delight was just as hot. This was fried belly meat: little pieces of skin, fat and meat, crisp and seasoned with chiles, garlic and sugar. The basil was not ordinary anise-scented basil but peppery bai krapow, so fragile it has to be used within a day of picking. You can find it occasionally in Thai markets.
It certainly doesn’t hurt to take some Thai-speaking friends with you, to help translate the impressive specials menu (the regular menu is in English) and to make recommendations. The waitresses can guide you through the specials, though.
Lunchtime offers some surprises as well. I’ve had a version of pad Thai in the style of Khonkaen in northeastern Thailand. The noodles are mixed with peanuts and fresh and dried shrimp, topped with a spectacular tower of bean sprouts, shredded red cabbage and carrot -- you won’t find the standard tofu and heaps of seasoning such as paprika.
Another lunch dish was goi soi (my spelling -- it was from the specials menu in Thai), a northeastern Thai dish of beef strongly seasoned with lime juice, very spicy with chiles, fragrant with kaffir lime leaf and crunchy with roasted rice. Another northeastern special that day was a salad of cucumber strips seasoned with garlic, Thai chiles and whole lime wedges -- home-style food, my Thai companions told me.
Still another special, nam, was short, meaty spareribs cooked the way sausage is done in northeastern Thailand. Well browned and glistening, the sour-tasting ribs are eaten with peanuts and slices of ginger root -- more drinking food.
The Thai definition of salad is odd -- broad enough to include barbecued pork with spicy sauce -- but you won’t get any greens in this meaty dish. It is sliced pork with a rich grilled taste, seasoned with fish sauce and lime juice, slathered with sliced garlic and a murderous amount of chopped chiles. (Wipe off the chile, and you’ll survive -- otherwise, this dish is really hot.)
The ground meat dish larb, also regarded as a salad, might seem a little more so in that it’s light and fresh tasting and eaten at room temperature. It’s usually served with crisp raw vegetables, if that helps your salad sensibility, and here you’ll get it with cabbage. Duck larb is a Ban Phai specialty, and it’s authoritatively sour and hot, aromatic with basil and gritty with ground roasted rice.
We’ve become accustomed to sweetness in Thai cooking, but Ban Phai makes a salad of green eggplant topped with ground pork that is sour, salty and spicy, without a trace of sugar. A Thai in my group praised it for having that real Thai taste.
Chinese broccoli with crispy pork is a fatty dish, but it’s worth the splurge. The meat is pork belly, boiled and then fried crisp and crunchy. It’s like Mexican chicharron, and it’s delicious with the garlic-laced broccoli. Next to it on the menu is ka-ree chicken on rice -- not pieces of curried chicken on top of rice, but a fine plate of chicken fried rice subtly seasoned with curry powder; a good change from plain steamed rice.
The menu is long, 116 dishes in addition to lunch specials and the dishes written in Thai on the board. Only one that I’ve tried turned out badly: fried trout in thick, gooey batter.
Desserts are not important here. Ice cream and fried bananas are on the menu, but a better option if you insist on something sweet is to pick up something from the dessert shops in nearby Thai Town. Either that, or skip dessert and stick around after 9 for the music.
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Ban Phai Thai
Location: 5908 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 464-3564
Price: Appetizers, $3.99 to $6.99; soups and salads, $4.99 to $8.99; main dishes, $4.99 to $6.99; seafood dishes, $6.99 to $12.99
Best dishes: Grilled beef balls, Chinese broccoli with crispy pork, spicy steamed seafood, barbecued pork with spicy sauce, pad Thai Khonkaen
Details: Open 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily. Beer and wine. Street parking. Most major credit cards