Jitlada Restaurant

🇹🇭 THAILAND / FREE FRIDAY FAVORITES: Even six years after the death of Chef Tui, the warmth and staggeringly delicious food of Jitlada remains.

🇹🇭 THAILAND
📍 5233 Sunset Blvd.,
Thai Town, Central Los Angeles.
🅿️ Very small lot in plaza
🥤 Beer and wine

FREE FRIDAY FAVORITES is a series of articles that revisit choice restaurants featured on eattheworldla.com over the years. These will never be behind the paywall, but will update information as necessary and always be about meals that are worth returning for again.
📆 Original Article 09 January 2019

If you are generally interested in world foods yet not from Los Angeles, chances are that you still remember the time you read Dana Goodyear's profile of Jonathan Gold in the New Yorker near the end of 2009. By the last few paragraphs of the uplifting article your vision had become blurred by happy tears as you read about Jitlada and its owners Jazz and Tui. Maybe you were even harboring ill will towards Los Angeles based on stereotypes and brief interactions, until these stories and this great man made something click that before that day had not.

This beautiful part of Los Angeles has always been here, championed by people like Jonathan Gold and well-known by the millions that call it home. It was you that had changed and now could be open enough to realize the mistake. And if you brought this new openness with you on a visit and finally met Jazz in person, she would welcome you into Jitlada as if she had known you and your friends and family since she moved to town.

The magic of Jitlada is some of the most delicious dishes you will eat in your life in the presence of such warm hospitality. It is a Thai restaurant amongst many others in East Hollywood’s Thai Town, but it specializes in the fiery favorites of Southern Thailand. Its menu has hundreds of dishes, but you will find it difficult to order a dud.

While not necessarily a southern dish, yum pak boong grob ยำผักบุ้งกรอบ ($18.95, above) is a salad of fried water morning glory that is done better nowhere else. The dish becomes essential as other spicy plates and bowls start to surround you. The deep-fried vegetable is crispy and covered in a sauce that is sour, a bit sweet, and sings the love languages of southern Thailand.

One must-try bowl for any southern Thai meal is kaeng leuang thala แกงเหลืองหน่อไม้ปลาดุก ($19.95, above), a sour yellow fish curry that is unlike all the other tastes in your life up until this point. The sourness hits you right away, while the chili peppers take a little bit of time to settle into each part of your mouth. Eat this with ample portions of rice and if you ordered it spicy (as it should be), take your time.

For more tastes you can only get in the south, try one of a few dishes that include sator, a small green bean that is usually translated as "stinky." Southerners who have family in the north load their suitcases full of this treasure when they visit. The pad sator kung ($21.95, below) is a stir fry including squid and ground pork, and if possible ratchets up the heat levels even more.

It may seem like too much of a leap for some, but trust Jitlada and Thai people in general to make fat worms delectable. The intimidatingly large silk worms หนอนทอดกรอบ ($23.95, above) are deep fried and combined with chili and green onion, and almost disintegrate into dust when bitten. Drizzle some of the homemade sauce on each bite if you still have the tolerance for more heat.

Further into the section of meats you may eat less of during normal dinners, a plate of enormous frog legs also provides a non-spicy option. Kob thawt กบทอดขมิ้น ($19.95, below) are marinated in turmeric, deep fried, and then topped with crispy fried garlic. Because of their size, they offer more meat than the typical frog leg, and can be dipped in the fiery sauce if desired.

On a visit to Jitlada in 2015 there was one simple mistake made between the table and kitchen, when Jazz accidentally told her brother Tui that the dishes should be made at their highest level. Spice levels being high are usually encouraged as to enjoy that struggle sometimes involved when eating foods beyond a high tolerance.

With an eating partner’s spice level a few levels down, the request was put in for nothing that would kill her. What arrived was far different though, full of heat that hit like a brick wall. Combined with kaeng leuang thala and pad sator kung, the kua kling moo คั่วกลิ้งหมู ($19.95, below) was the last straw.

This dish of dry roasted curry paste with ground pork was off the charts. In the past you may have fought through spicy foods to climb to what could be considered a sort of plateau, a place that once reached everything seems to level out and become easier. At the highest spice levels here at Jitlada, it never comes.

So on the way to getting to that plateau, the lights go out. But there could not be a better meal or place to experience it! And don't worry, you can have a long conversation about your limits and come up with a plan to make the food to your taste. That being said, this is certainly not a place to eat if you do not enjoy spicy foods, for the versions that are toned down too much do not do justice to the original concepts.

Another dish to help with your interior heat levels is pad pak boong ผัดผักบุ้ง ($16.95, above), sauteed water morning glory in oyster sauce. It may have started out off the menu, but the special Jazz burger (below) is now advertised throughout the restaurant and common knowledge for regular customers. Basically, it is a grilled meat patty that contains everything wonderful about the restaurant, served without any bun.

If you make it this far, sit back and relax, enjoy the place and its atmosphere. Jazz will have no doubt come to you if you have not struck up a conversation already. Read some of the praise all over the walls and on the tables. There is a lot of love within these walls, both from the people that welcome you in and from those that keep returning and love it right back.

Jitlada is the type of place that you bring your out of town visitors to when they want something different in Los Angeles than they can get back home. The menu is vast and it would take a year’s worth of dining to try it all, but there are hardly any failures if you stick with the southern-inspired portions of the menu.

Transport yourself to the wonderful seafood market restaurants of Phuket with spicy crab claw morning glory แกงใต้ก้ามปูผักบุ้ง ($21.95, above). Meaty hunks of crab can be sucked out of five claws and a medium-level curry filled with fresh morning glory is great to eat with spoonfuls of jasmine rice.

If there happens to be a Thai person who grew up in southern Thailand with you, the khao yum ข้าวยำ ($18.95, above and below) will get her talking about her mother’s version, a seemingly simple dish so full of flavors and textures. You spike the rice with portions of sweet chili pepper and fermented fish sauces (above, top left) to taste, but these are more subtle than many things on the table, so you might want to add their full umami once the plate of chopped vegetables gets involved as well.

This dish originates in Songkla but can be found all over the south nowadays. Once everything is mixed together and the proper amounts of sauces are aportioned, a colorful concoction will lead everyone at the table to stretch out their plate for a bite.

You can also have a more mild curry experience with kanom jeen ขนมจีนนํ้ายาปักษ์ใต้ลูกชิ้นปลา ($19.95, below), a murky fish soup with rice vermicelli noodles. Ground snapper and fish balls are added to a deeply southern curry, with a plate of fresh vegetables and herbs served on the side to added as desired.

As more and more dishes are sampled at Jitlada in future visits, they will of course be added here for more recommendations. Grab a group of six or eight of your friends with the best appetites and get here soon to try and make your way through the menu as well.

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