Honestly if a Thai/Isaan Auntie or Granny is not making the som tum I ain’t eating it
Probably fair. I remember liking Jitlada’s, though.
One thing that is amazing, and only at this location, is their chicken noodle salad. Cold, sweet heat. Really nice and good at lunch.
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we are scheduled to make our night + market debuts this evening at sahm. curious to see what the salt situation will be. i guess based on the above i will pass on the som tum.
Love the crispy rice salad. Also had a potato curry (?) there that was delicious (not very spicy but still very flavorful).
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Som tum at night market is completely skippable. The rice salad, noodle salad, and larbs are better for that kind of spicy lime/sugar type dish.
just got back from dinner and am sorry to say that we were not impressed at all. the only dish we thought was good across the board was a clam dish from the specials menu. no idea how much variation there is across the locations but i cannot see any reason to pay a lot of money here for food well below the best of thai town. we’re going to need to get to pailin before leaving to eat a proper khao soi.
but did not find salt to be an issue. the only thing that was very salty was the chilli dip with the pork toro, but eating it with sticky rice fixed that.
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Personally I like the original the best. At the Venice location, it’s best to stick with more non traditional stuff IMO - it really is nothing like the other locations
So sorry you didn’t like the food. 
I haven’t been particularly fond of the few items I’ve ordered off the specials menu, so I tend to stick w/ the crispy rice salad and larbs.
I’ve only been to the WeHo location and the Venice location perhaps twice each. Do they not have the same menus? Or is the execution totally different?
it was not a bad meal. in minnesota this would be quite good–though i’d take the two best places in st. paul over it (based on last night’s dinner). it just wasn’t anywhere close to being on par with thai town’s best.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. All of N+M’s locations are MUCH closer to me than Thai Town, so convenience sometimes outweighs the QPR.
What do you consider Thai Town’s best? I love Luv2Eat (although I assume the style is also quite different from N+M). Love Jitlada in terms of taste but the indiff service (bordering on passive-aggressively hostile) and $ makes it a no-go for me. Have been to Sapp Coffee Shop and found it… meh? Only went once, though. Like Ruen Pair (but the food tastes “cheap,” if that makes any sense).
Have not been to Pailin.
thai town favourites? jitlada, pailin. just outside thai town, luv2eat, isaan station (though haven’t been in a couple of years). i get what you say about ruen pair (and would extend that to crispy pork gang and grill) but the flavours at even the old-school thai places in thai town are always right. at sahm the massaman curry and khao soi were both too “dark” in their flavour, if that makes sense–almost as if there were overly caramelized onions in there. maybe these are acceptable variations but tasted just a bit off to us—normally we fight over the khao soi, here we didn’t finish it. really liked the sweet potato in the massaman but not the curry itself. the pork toro had too many pieces that were too chewy to the point of being rubbery or stringy.
i get that their goal is not to do traditional thai but something hybrid. it may just have been a case of crossed expectations.
and the service may have been friendly but it was comically clueless/harried. we ordered jasmine rice with the massaman but they plopped the curry down in the middle of the table with no rice. we kept waiting for the rice to arrive, looking expectantly at various servers who were passing or standing by us. nothing. eventually we flagged one down and asked if our jasmine rice was forthcoming. she disappeared into the kitchen, emerged and told us it would be out soon. we wondered how difficult it would be to bring a bowl of rice out but kept waiting. eventually we flagged a managerial looking gent down and asked again. he went into the kitchen and brought us some rice. 10 minutes later the first server plopped a sticky rice down. our khao soi came with no lime but the one our neighbours got came with lime. and the moo sadoong came out at the end.
also, what is up with the big-ass bottles of water on the table that are all but impossible to pour from?
No, I do think I get what you’re saying. The flavors are very intense at N+M, and sometimes the balance is off. We got the pastrami pad see ew once (if you didn’t know they were a hybrid b/f that…), and it was a big disappointment for me. Too much gristle (I don’t think you can just cut pastrami up randomly into small pieces and expect each of those pieces to be wonderfully edible), and too much “fat.” Not actual fat, but in terms of richness of flavor. It desperately needed some acid to brighten things and ended up tasting very muddled, despite seemingly having a (cacophonous) number of flavors.
Thanks for the list of restaurants. And I agree that the flavors of the Ruen Pair are “right,” even if the underlying materials are… suboptimal. Contrast that to one of the specials I had at N+M. The fish was seemingly of very high quality, but the prep tasted much like a dish found at any decent Chinese place… and the fish was not enough to elevate the dish as a whole.
I like N+M’s brashness. There are some misses, though.
no doubt. and i will not judge the other two locations by this one.
anyway, this discussion inspired me to go eat lunch at ruen pair today after many, many years. still good, solid food without any flourishes or surprises.
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Tried Night+Market Sahm for lunch the other day and really enjoyed our meal!
We ordered the party wings (excellent), pastrami pad kee mao (superlative), and shortrib khao soi (okay). The only slight disappointment was the khao soi. It was tasty, but I prefer the textural contrast of crispy noodles, and the broth lacked fishy funk.
Dat pastrami pad kee mao though … so good!
it only took 3.5 months but i finally wrote up our dinner at sahm on the blog.
The original Night + Market opened in West Hollywood in 2010 (I think). I think it first flashed on our consciousness a few years later. We’d been planning on eating there ever since but somehow never got around to it—don’t feel too bad for us: we were mostly feeding our Thai food desires at Jitlada at the time. Somewhere in there they opened a second location in Silverlake (NIght + Market Song) but between menus that did not seem particularly kid-friendly and a no-reservations policy at Song, we never got around to it—it didn’t help that Luv2Eat opened in that period. Last year they opened their third location, Sahm, in Venice, and despite the fact that it’s the furthest of their outposts from our usual base of operations in Koreatown, that ended up being our first-ever Night+Market meal. We ate it as our last meal of 2018, in the early evening after a day spent with the kids on the beach and at the Santa Monica pier. I would love to say that our first Night+Market experience and our last meal of 2018 was great but, alas, it was not. That is not to say that it was bad; it was not bad, but it was, in our opinion, far from the quality of the best in Thai Town.
Now, a few caveats are appropriate here. The first is that Night+Market in general is not striving to be a traditional Thai restaurant in the mold of Jitlada or Luv2Eat (or Sapp or Pailin). This is Thai food refracted through the prism of hipster small plates dining; the food is recognizably Thai but it is aimed primarily at non-Thai diners outside Thai Town. This is true, as far as I can make out, not only of Sahm in Venice but also of Song and the original location. You can see this marked in the aesthetic of the restaurant, in the natural wine list, and, of course, you can see it simply by looking to see who is dining at the tables around you. None of this necessarily means disappointing food—and indeed we liked some of the things we ate a lot—but, on the whole, we felt there was nothing here that we hadn’t eaten better versions of in Thai Town. Of course, the ambience here is very different than in the average Thai Town spot, and if you want to go out for a good Thai meal in hip surroundings, it is hard to say why that shouldn’t be an available option. The key, I guess, is to have properly calibrated expectations. The second caveat is that the menus at the three locations are not at all identical, and so our meal at Sahm may not be indicative at all of what is on offer at the other two locations (both of which are far closer to Thai Town).
I certainly hope that the service at Sahm is not indicative of what’s on offer at the other two locations. They were not yet full when we arrived for dinner (at 5.30; we had a reservation) but they were already harried and all over the place. I don’t know if they were understaffed but service was almost comically bad. It took a while to get anyone’s attention to order, it was hard to get anyone’s attention after that, we were given no rice and it took asking two separate servers if it was coming before it did (a good while after we asked) and so on.
But what, you may be wondering, did we eat?
- Gai Tod Naeng Noi ; This was for the boys: crisply-fried and sliced chicken thighs served with a dipping sauce. The dipping sauce was tasty, the chicken had little character without it. The boys enjoyed it though. This plus rice is mostly what they ate.
- Pork toro: I had read good reports of this dish of grilled, fatty pork neck but sadly what showed up was some over-cooked and overly-chewy slices of pork. The dipping sauce was very good but the pork itself left us wishing for the dish it could have been if grilled with more care.
- Moo sadong : However, this dish of their so-called “startled pig”, a salad of grilled pork with rice powder, lemongrass, lime, chilli etc. was rather good.
- Khao soi rib : On paper this seemed like a sure thing but what showed was too heavy, missing the acid/brightness that adds counterpoint to excellent khao soi such as the one at Pailin. Indeed, I’d say that the khao soi at the Twin Cities’ Bangkok Thai Deli is better and that’s not a sentence I ever expected to type about any dish at one of Los Angeles’ more vaunted Thai restaurants.
- Sweet potato massaman : This take on massaman curry seemed similarly intriguing on paper but also disappointed in reality. The sauce was too cloying and “dark” in terms of flavours and the sweet potato made it more cloying still.
- Cloud Bay clams : Thankfully, this excellent dish from the specials menu of plump clams stir-fried in what I will lazily call a red curry sauce ended the meal on a high note.
Launch the slideshow for a look at the restaurant and the food; scroll down for more on service and price and to see what’s coming next.
[pictures on the blog]
Service, as I said, was chaotic from beginning to end. I can only imagine how much worse it must have gotten after we left—there were lots of people waiting. I also want to mention the bottles of water they place on the table: they are massive and god help you with pouring from them if you have carpal tunnel syndrome. The bag in which they packed our small boxes of leftovers was likewise ludicrously large. I guess this must all be ironic or something.
Anyway, all of the food above, a beer and a soft drink, and tax came to $110. After tip we were at $130. That seemed very high for the quality of what we ate; though it is probably well within reason for the kind of restaurant it is. We’re certainly not in a hurry to go back to Sahm on our next trip or three, though we’re open to giving one of the other locations a try. It also made us want to go eat at a more old-school Thai Town place before we left and we did that a few days later. That’ll be my next review from the Los Angeles trip. Before that I’ll have a review of a far fancier meal in Minneapolis and perhaps the long-threatened third installment in my series on Indian food writing in the US.
(Oh yes, good luck finding parking!)
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and two weeks later still here is my write-up of the lunch we ate at ruen pair just a few days after dinner at sahm.
It remains a truth universally acknowledged that Los Angeles has the best Thai food in North America. Well, I’m sure there are people in Portland and New York who would like to disagree but why bother with folly? On longer visits we eat out in Thai Town a fair bit. On this trip, however, I was only going to be there a week (the family had already been there another week before I got there from Delhi—aren’t our travel details fascinating?) and so we’d planned on just one Thai meal and Night + Market Sahm was going to be it. But after the disappointment of that dinner—which we’d been looking forward to, we had to eat a better Thai meal before leaving L.A. The thing to do was to go back to a Thai Town classic. But which one? We considered returns to Pailin or Jitlada but in the end decided to go back to a Thai Town institution that we hadn’t been to in a decade and a half: Ruen Pair. And it was a very good idea.
Ruen Pair is the anchor of a shopping strip that may be the heart of Thai Town’s food scene: the New Hollywood Plaza, located at the intersection of Hollywood and Harvard. There are five or six Thai restaurants there: the excellent Crispy Pork Gang & Grill next door, the third location of Pa Ord across the way and a few others, some of whom are new (Red Corner Asia is gone and has been replaced by a place called Tumnak Thai—I have no idea what it’s like). But frankly, if you’re looking to do an old-school Thai Town meal, Ruen Pair should probably be your first choice. The interior seems to have been spiffed up a fair bit since my last visit; the food is as good as it ever was. There is nothing trendy on the menu, and the ingredients are far from luxe but the flavours are just right.
We were just the four of us (us and our brats) and so we did not order in our usual deranged manner. This is what we ate:
- Fried green mussels : Lightly battered and crisply fried mussels with scrambled eggs and bean sprouts. Sriracha on the side. Very nice.
- Nam tok : We got the beef version and it was textbook: clean, sharp flavours and searing heat.
- Boat noodles : Their iteration is on the lighter side. I like more blood in my boat noodles but the missus prefers this style.
- Stewed pork leg over rice : This was for the boys and they loved it. Pork braised till silken with a sweet, just short of cloying sauce. Excellent hot dipping sauce on the side that we appropriated for our mussels.
- Spicy catfish : You can get this either deep-fried or steamed in red curry. Due to our commitment to healthy eating we got it steamed. It was very good indeed.
Well, I guess that was probably an excessive order for two adults and two children. Anyway, for a look at the restaurant and the food please launch the slideshow below. Scroll down to see how much it cost and to see what’s coming next.
With tax and tip all of this came to about $65, I want to say. I failed to photograph the bill as is my usual habit; and they’re a cash-only place and so I can’t verify via my credit card. Speaking of the cash-only thing, they have an ATM in the restaurant. Anyway, very good value for what we ate, especially compared to Sahm. I’m sorry to be in the position of championing an old-school restaurant over an inventive, upscale place; I’m doing it not because I prefer “ethnic” food to be cheap but because while the flavours at Ruen Pair were very good, Sahm left us cold. We would be very happy to pay as much as we did at Sahm for their better ingredients if they could make them taste better.
Up next on the food front: a visit to Hai Hai in Minneapolis and then a few more Delhi reports. And, of course, booze along the way.
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