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Echo Park -- If you want Thai street cooking like we’ve been eating since the days when signs read “Chinese-Thai” so they wouldn’t scare delicate palates away, head for one of the branches of Sticky Rice, which has been serving familiar Bangkok cooking since 2013.
The three locations of Sticky Rice, though they have the same menu, are not the same restaurant. The Grand Central Market Sticky is a stand, as is everything in the Market. The Highland Park Sticky is in a bar and nightclub with Thai food served from a window and eaten at outside tables. But the Sticky Rice in Echo Park is a proper restaurant, albeit deeply downhome. You order at a counter, and eat at a handful of indoor tables, and on a patio looking out at the ebb and flow of Sunset Boulevard.
It’s not hard to imagine yourself in Bangkok dining districts like Chatuchuk or Bang Rak at Sticky Rice. There’s a framed poster, in Thai, of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker. There’s a wall clock with numbers in Siamese script. There’s a poster for a Thai gangster movie. The tables are plain and easily wiped clean. The chairs are hard. And the food is … delicious, served in joyously large portions.
Original Sriracha sauce at Sticky Rice.
Photo by Merrill Shindler
For those of us who have been heading to East Hollywood and deep into the Valley for classic Thai cooking, this is an alternative destination for soulful tom yum soup, heavy with crimini mushrooms, mad with lemongrass and lime leaves. (The tom kha soup adds coconut and the mysterious galanga root.) Move up to the noodle soups, and tom yum includes pork three ways (ground, sliced and balls), peanuts and a hardcooked egg. In cliche terms, a meal in a bowl. Which, as with most cliches, is also true.
Of course there’s papaya salad, a mishmash that’s grown into an obsession. The chicken satay is tender, with a peanut sauce that would make rocks taste good. There’s a snappy sweet chili sauce with the crispy shrimp rolls, with the veggie egg rolls, and with the deep-fried tofu. The roti with green curry is Indian – and what’s wrong with that? The pineapple fried rice is Chinese, and kind of silly; pineapple and cashews seem like something a kid might combine. The pad Thai may well be the last taste I want before I shuffle off this mortal coil.
Oh, and for dessert, there’s crispy banana samosa with coconut sauce … and mango sticky rice – which is the only sticky rice dish on the menu. No matter. It’s Sticky Rice that’s stuck around for a decade now, becoming part of the landscape, a chunk of our street life. It’s where we go to feel the Thai soul of LA.
Tom yum soup, chicken satay, crispy shrimp rolls, veggie egg rolls and deep-fried tofu are just a few of the options at Sticky Rice
Merrill Shindler has spent his life eating for a living in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. His idea of psychotherapy is a seat at a bar, with a beer in hand, and a Dodger game on the big screen.
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