“I made it spicy for you,” she says as she sets the duck soup in front of me. Steam billows up from the bowl, perfuming the air with cinnamon and star anise.
I hadn’t asked for the soup to be spicy, but the owner of Street Thai remembers me from a previous visit just two days prior. On that visit, she took great delight in my order, which involved several dishes served authentically spicy, or “Thai style.” Most notably from that night was a great rendition of pork pad kra prao. When the owner placed that stir-fried pork with chilies on the table, she didn’t step away until she witnessed me take a bite. When she saw my eyes begin to water, she smiled.
Tonight’s duck noodle soup is a dish commonly found in Bangkok’s Chinatown, where the boundaries between Thai and Chinese cuisine have long been murky at best. What generally makes this soup more Thai than Chinese is the addition of fresh Thai chilies. Or sometimes pickled chilies. Without the peppers, the soup is actually very sweet. The chilies give it balance more than heat.
A family from Bangkok opened Street Thai in February in a rundown strip mall in a neighborhood of Huntington Beach that is quickly evolving. The tiny cafe accommodates only about 25 people at a time. It’s not busy yet, but it will be soon.
Several swanky new apartment and condo complexes are opening directly across the street and just around the corner, from which hundreds of new residents will soon be swarming this place.
The menu has been getting longer with each visit. All the usual suspects are here: tom kha gai, pad Thai, green papaya salad, crying tiger, green curry… and all of those things are very good. But dig a little deeper.
Rather, look at the wall. That’s where you’ll find a bunch of daily or weekly specials scribbled on notebook paper taped to the wall. That’s where you’ll find the duck soup. And that’s where you’ll find the duck larb, a salad made with chopped dark meat, onion, chilies and mint.
One of the items that made it from the wall to the actual menu is the “Thai chef’s salad,” which is an absolutely brilliant chopped salad made with ground chicken, sauteed shrimp, toasted coconut, spinach leaves and crisp green beans so fresh that I wonder whether they came from the farmer’s market on the other side of the parking lot. The dressing is a sweet/sour blend of tamarind, palm sugar, lime juice, red chili paste and coconut milk. This is seriously one of the best salads I’ve ever found in a Thai restaurant. In any restaurant, really.
There’s also a shrimp salad, called phla goong, that is equally delicious, albeit a much simpler and more traditional lime-dressed Thai salad.
Another of those “deeper” discoveries is the rad na, which isn’t usually thought of as a deep dive. Rad na is a standard Thai noodle dish made with wide rice noodles, Chinese kale and Thai gravy. Every Thai restaurant serves it. But this one is different. The chef takes the steamed rice noodles and forms them into little patties, then fries those already soft patties in a wok until they’re crispy and slightly burnt around the edges but still squishy and slippery in the middle. This creates an extraordinary contrast of textures and a much deeper layering of flavors, something that I’ve always found missing from every other rad na I’ve ever sampled. And after having this one, I’ll never be able to eat rad na anywhere else.
“Add some pickled chili,” the owner says. “It makes it even better.”
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Street Thai
rnWhere: 15887 Gothard St., Huntington Beach
When: Lunch and dinner daily
Phone: 714-799-2000