Regional plates from this week’s District:
PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
Like orange chicken and the California roll before it, pad Thai has been folded right into the American appetite, a dish so popular it’s now the barometer by which many measure all those Thai restaurants copied and pasted into every overbuilt strip mall. Consume enough of the stuff and you’ll be able to spot a hackneyed rendition from across the room: a wet mess drowned in a sauce as shockingly red as ketchup. But pad Thai only weeds out the worst Americanized Thai food—there isn’t a single dish that does the same for Thailand’s countless regional cuisines.
In Long Beach’s corner of the county, the dishes of northeastern Thailand reign. Influenced by the porous culinary borders shared with Laos and Cambodia, northeastern Thailand’s cuisine is distinct from its central and southern counterparts. And as a result, even after decades of snowballing popularity, its flavors are still sometimes too foreign to assign only one representative plate. At Cerritos’ Thai Issan, for example, the defining dish is sai krok, a slightly sour pork sausage lit up by galangal, kaffir lime leaf and lemon grass. Norwalk’s venerable Renu Nakorn, meanwhile, is best when under the influence of the heavy scent of jackfruit curry. Tantalizingly Thai in Lakewood, however, isn’t as easily encapsulated.
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