Mae Malai Thai House of Noodles

🇹🇭 THAILAND / Boat noodles may have put Chef Malai Data on the Thai Town map, but she has even more special things going on inside her new restaurant.

🇹🇭 THAILAND
📍 5445 Hollywood Blvd.,
Thai Town, East Hollywood
🅿️ Plaza has private garage
🥤 No Alcohol

📸 All photos by Jared Cohee
for Eat the World Los Angeles

If you have ever spent time or lived in Thailand, you will have memories of when the heat and humidity are almost too much. Just when you are reaching the limit of your body’s ability to cope by dipping in and out of air-conditioned shopping centers, it is finally a bowl of incredibly spicy noodles that comes to the rescue. Counterintuitively, this heat helps all the warmth trapped inside come out through your pores and dribble off your brow in sweat.

Since spending three months on a first visit to the nation in 2001 backpacking during the hottest months, high temperatures have always brought cravings for devilishly spicy bowls. The recent heat wave that hit Southern California was no different, and finally a visit to Mae Malai was warranted.

Longan juice น้ำลำไย ($4.95)

The bright orange dining room is especially prevalent once the sun goes down and the plaza really kicks into gear during dinner. Uber and Lyft drivers seem stuck on a constant loop around the parking lot, picking up and dropping off passengers. The atmosphere inside is a little less Bangkok and more Los Angeles than the owner’s first concept in front of Silom Supermarket, where she dished out noodle bowls to customers on small plastic stools a few nights per week.

For a while that spot on the sidewalk a couple blocks away seemed like the test kitchen of Thai Town, where vendors like Spicy BBQ and Rad Na Silom also got their footing to go on to bigger things. Thankfully the noodles are just as good at the chef’s new location, maybe even better in some instances. The menu has also had the ability to expand with all the new kitchen space.

Despite one of the egg roll options taking Mae Malai’s name, choose the Anusawari egg rolls ปอเปี๊ยะอนุสาวรีย์ ($13.49, above) which are made in house unlike the former. Glass noodles and ground chicken join other more common egg roll ingredients, and a fresh leaf of Thai basil is wrapped up in the thin shell and fried to a perfect crisp that splinters in every direction when bitten.

Anusawari is the Thai word for monument, but when you are in Bangkok and talk anusawari, you are speaking of a specific place called Victory Monument. The area around this monument and its metro station is known as a hub of food vendors, with famous stalls for boat noodles, pad thai, and just about anything you might be craving.

Chef Malai seems to have become beloved and essential in the city with her bowls of boat noodles, available with either pork or beef and served with or without broth. As you would find in Thailand, the bowls are much smaller, allowing a diner to eat multiple rounds or switch between offerings until full. Unfortunately for the moment, the original Thai boat noodle ก๋วยเตี๋ยวเรือ ($8.49, above) seems to be the only bowl here available in this size, but maybe there are plans to change this in the future.

In all honesty, the bowl is still larger than its inspiration back home, and depending on your appetite less than ten bucks might even feel you up. But the same feelings from the night stall are still here, that there are probably better bowls around town. It is still very good, if not at the top of the list. But it allows you to look around at other menu items and explore what Chef Malai might be even better at making.

Before sampling the shining star, take the opportunity to order her poached and dipped beef ลวกจิ้ม ($12.49, above). This is not so common in Los Angeles but something at every table when friends eat at a noodle shop in Thailand. Various cuts of beef meat and organs are poached in kaffir lime leaves and lemongrass, a taste of tradition that will hit any notes you might be missing.

Each piece is meant to be dipped in the accompanying nam jim jaew full of lime, shallots, and roasted rice powder, but do not smother it or you will miss out on the expert touch of the poaching. A dish like this usually includes all the cuts of meat that a shop might have, ordered so that diners can eat more but avoid too many carbs by overloading on noodles.

The most special offering at Mae Malai might be hinted at if you speak to Chef Malai and hear she is originally from the province of Uttaradit. Situated next to Sukhothai in central Thailand, this is home to some of the tastiest style of tom yum noodle soups, which you can find all around the country nowadays.