Thai Town, a six-block stretch of Hollywood Boulevard between Western and Normandie, has long been a destination for food-loving Angelenos – a pilgrimage, even. This neighborhood is home to some of the city’s best Thai restaurants – most of them tucked inside strip malls that get so busy at night they need valet parking.
In 1972, Bangkok Market opened on the eastern edge of Melrose Avenue. It was the first Thai market in the United States, owned by the parents of celebrity chef Jet Tila, who has appeared on various U.S. food television shows. Tila’s Thai-Chinese parents had moved to the United States along with the wave of immigrants who came in the 1960s, settling in L.A., where Tila was born and raised. Bangkok Market, with its wide assortment of Thai produce, spices, chili pastes & household products, became an important hub for the local Thai immigrant population and though it closed in 2019 when Tila’s parents retired, it was instrumental in the creation of Thai Town.
The neighborhood continued to attract Thai residents and business owners, and earned the official designation of Thai Town in 1999 from the Los Angeles City Council. Not only was this neighborhood the first Thai Town in the world, it is also the only official Thai Town in the entire United States. It is no surprise, as Los Angeles is home to the largest Thai population outside of Thailand, at an estimated 50,000 people.
Thai Town is home to all manner of Thai businesses, including grocery stores and traditional Thai clothing and jewelry stores, but most importantly, it’s a gold mine of delicious Thai food. Some iconic dishes have been around for decades: the jade noodles at Sapp Coffee Shop, the duck noodle soup at Rodded, and Jitlada’s expansive menu. These old-school favorites continue to attract new and returning customers to Thai Town, but it was only in the past few years that new openings have excited the city’s curious diners.
One of those exciting new additions comes from a family who actually operates one of the older restaurants in Thai Town, Ruen Pair. Pensri and Somchai Jansaeng opened Ruen Pair in 1996 and it has become a Thai Town mainstay with their beloved papaya salad and extensive menu of traditional Thai dishes. In 2020, Pensri and Somchai’s son, Champ Jansaeng, and his wife, Chanita Maneekarn, took over the restaurant. With a new generation in charge, Ruen Pair got a bit of a facelift and a stronger social media presence, helping to attract new customers to the restaurant. Jansaeng and Maneekarn were able to retain most of their long-term staff, so the menu stayed the same even as the restaurant’s visuals and interiors were upgraded. “We just wanted everything to look more modern but still keep that old feel of Ruen Pair,” says Champ Jansaeng. Among the fun new things they’re doing is partnering with a local brewery for an exclusive tom yum beer inspired by the hot-and-sour soup of the same name: a wheat ale brewed with galangal, lemongrass and makrut lime leaves. Even during the recent rainstorm in L.A., Ruen Pair was packed and customers lined up for a table.
After a couple of years of running Ruen Pair, Jansaeng and Maneekarn started discussing doing something of their own, and opened Kanomwaan next door in December of 2023. Inside the colorful storefront, Kanomwaan serves desserts that are familiar to L.A. denizens but with Thai flavors. There’s gelato and sorbet with rotating flavors (one of the most original recent ones is a spicy tom yum sorbet). There’s bingsu (Korean-style shaved ice) but featuring flavors like bua loy (a traditional Thai dessert of rice balls in coconut milk) and salted egg yolk. “Our first goal was really to introduce people to more traditional Thai flavors but kind of bridging the gap,” says Jansaeng.
Around the same time as the changing of the guards at Ruen Pair, a noodle stall called Radna Silom set up shop in front of Silom Supermarket just down the block. Radna Silom is operated by a mother and her four sons, and has become a destination for noodle-loving Angelenos. Here, customers chow down on some of the city’s best pad thai and rad nah – a dish of stir-fried wide rice noodles – on plastic stools and tables covered in red-and-white checkered tablecloths. Unlike the Americanized pad thai that is ubiquitous in this country, Radna Silom’s pad thai is pungent with dried shrimp and fish sauce.
Today, the sidewalk in front of Silom Supermarket has become a mini night market with multiple food stalls. While certain restaurants are busy day and night, the sidewalks of Thai Town are usually pretty quiet, so the vibrancy of this particular stretch of the sidewalk at night is a welcomed change. Mae Malai was one of the most popular stalls on the sidewalk, drawing crowds with their boat noodles and other Thai noodle soups. Their success led to them to recently upgrade from their weekend-only stalls to a brick-and-mortar location on another Thai Town block.
Some of the openings in the past decade have also included non-Thai businesses, including the neighborhood wine bar Tabula Rasa, and the retro-themed coffee shop Obet and Del’s. Both also bring people into the neighborhood with their food pop-ups which have included the Jamaican pop-up Rubie, Japanese soul food from Yatai and more.
It’s rare for Thai Town to see new businesses opening because empty retail spaces are actually hard to come by. Eve Ramasoot landed the space that is now Heng Heng Chicken Rice only because she used to work for the owner of the previous business and he offered her the opportunity to take over the space. Ramasoot briefly ran a plant-based restaurant there, but she personally started eating chicken again and decided to open Heng Heng, which specializes in Thai-style Hainan chicken rice.
While initially only Thai customers came into Heng Heng, very quickly after the restaurant opened, the word spread. While there are other restaurants in the greater Los Angeles area that serve Hainan chicken, they’re few and far between, especially in the Hollywood area. Soon Heng Heng began to draw diners in from all over the city. Hainan chicken aside, another dish that became a favorite among many is the zaab, which can be made with crispy pork, crispy chicken or fish. Zaab means “tasty” in Thai, and this dish is certainly that: The crispy pork zaab is made with pork belly, lime dressing, onions, cilantro, chili flakes and rice powder. It’s flavorful and tangy and just slightly spicy – similar to the flavor profile of laab, another classic Thai dish, but with fried chunks of pork belly instead. Ramasoot was inspired by a similar dish she had at, of all places, a McDonald’s in Thailand many years ago, where they do a similar seasoning on chicken wings.
Ramasoot is all for the changes happening in Thai Town, she explains. The lights of the Silom Supermarket night market make the neighborhood feel more alive at night to her. Same with Jansaeng, who would love to see more Thai restaurants in Thai Town that appeal to a new and wider audience. So far, Thai Town has managed to keep its stalwarts while newcomers infuse the area with new energy. We’re excited to see – and taste – what comes next.
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