Kris Yenbamroong - Night + Market: Delicious Thai Food to Facilitate Drinking and Fun-Having Amongst Friends

MOM, DAD, ALFIE

I didnt come out of the womb ready to cook blood soup.

Before there was Night + Market there was Talsai, the restaurant that my dad, Prakas, and my grandma, Vilai, opened on the Sunset Strip in 1982, the year I was born. My dad was working for a Thai bank at the time and he had the idea to open a restaurant where he could take clients for business dinners. At the time, the restaurants that served legit Thai food were located in Thai Town, and for the most part they functioned as cheap ethnic food spots in the eyes of non-Thai people. You didnt go there for the ambiance, in other words. My dads concept was to elevate what a modern Thai restaurant could bethere were white tablecloths, there were wine pairings, there was contemporary Thai artwork on the walls. The waitresses wore black leather skirts, and the kitchen was using ingredients like filet mignon, fresh crab, and rack of lamb with Thai sauce. This was all happening at a time when Wolfgang Puck opened Spago and Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken launched Border Grillthe new era of LA fine dining was still in its early years.

Back in the eighties, no one knew that people would be interested in upscale Thai food. It just wasnt out there. The only chefs doing Asian fusion were white guys who put lemongrass in their beurre blanc. But my dads ethos was build it and they will come, although for the first year or two, they didnt. Their stylish dining room was empty most nights. They stared across the Sunset Strip, a block away from clubs like The Rainbow Room and The Roxy, at this Scandinavian restaurant called Scandia known for its rich and famous clientele and wondered why those people werent coming into their restaurant. Slowly though, it started to happen. By the early nineties it was the place to eat Thai food in LAcelebrities like Jack Nicholson, Mick Jagger, Axl Rose, Harrison Ford, Chuck Norris, Annie Lennox, Michael J. Fox, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Quincy Jones, and Sharon Stone all passed through the doors to taste my grandmas cooking, and there were various starred reviews in publications like the LA Times and Los Angeles magazine. Warren Beatty once had his car stolen outside the restaurant (he refused to use the valet service after that). Bob Dylan and Annie Lennox would listen to demo tapes in a back booth. Somewhere, there is a photo of me as a gawky preteen with a parted bowl cut posing with Brooke Shields.

Growing up as a restaurant brat, especially at a Thai restaurant, is an odd thing. You are immediately aware that your parents do something different from other parents. They work later hours, so you eat dinner later than the other kids; you spend time sleeping in the supply room, or fall asleep on the long drive home after the restaurant closes. And at some point I realized there was a gap between what we served at the restaurant and what the restaurant staff cooked for themselves when off duty or between shifts. There might be tiger prawns with garlic sauce, fried wonton Bags of Gold, or steamed seafood Hidden Treasures between the hours of five and ten p.m.; but before or after, the kitchen would be filled with the strong smells of sour fish curry, shrimp paste rice, and fermented sausages. I remember my grandma once making nam prik gapi (Shrimp Paste Chile Dip ) with high-quality shrimp paste she had just brought back from Thailand. It was so stinky that when it came time for dinner service, the stench was still lingering around the dining room. My aunt yelled at her to put the stuff away or else the farangs(white people) would think there was a dead animal in the kitchen. At that age I didnt fully grasp and appreciate what my family was trying to accomplish with the restaurantwhich was to showcase the upper echelons of Thai food culture in a modern, stylized way yet to be seen in Americabut I understood through the food alone that when my grandma cooked for paying customers, she was aiming for something different than what we all normally ate.

At Talsai, it was my grandma who held it down in the kitchen. My grandmother started selling noodles when she was about nine years old. She likes to joke that shes an 85-year-old fourth grader, since that was the year she left school to work. This was in pre-industrialized Thailand, in a rural village, so although she never worked in an official restaurant, she had a never-ending list of side hustles in order to scrape together a living. One gig was shuttling diamonds between the capital and her hometown, a process where shed sew the stones into the hem of her pants in case bandits hijacked the bus she was riding. But the overarching theme of her life centered on food. She sold pork stir-fries out of her parents shophouse when she was teenager. After she got married, she sold dim sum and fish curry as a street vendor in Southern Thailand while my grandpa studied to become a pharmacist. By the time the eighties rolled around, she and my grandpa were running a boarding-house in Bangkok. They got a call from their son living in America, and he invited her to come out to Los Angeles (for the first time ever) and help him run the restaurant he was opening. Ill take care of everything, he told her, and all you have to do is cook.