D. Gonzalez

Roti with green curry sauce at Gindi Thai

Somehow, food always seems to taste better when it's shared. And not just as it's passed around a table, but also when it travels across borders. The South Asian subcontinent has passed down its plates far and wide, providing the inspiration for new dishes through its native ingredients like pepper, ginger and cardamom, as well as incorporating itself into a wide world of meals through its unleavened flat bread, roti.

From South Africa's Cape Malay roti to the Caribbean's wrap roti, just as the use of spices spread across the globe, so has the use of roti and roti-like breads. Yet our favorite takes on roti don't wander too far from home. In L.A., some of the best roti comes from Southeast Asian restaurants like Gindi Thai, Simpang Asia and Penang Malaysian Cuisine.

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G. Snyder

Thai Snacks

If your spirits were damped after leaving Pasadena's 626 Night Market this weekend without so much as a pancake roll in hand, a good way to curb any lingering craving for Asian street food might have been to head for the Wat Thai temple in North Hollywood the next morning, where the annual Songkran festival, a celebration of the Thai new year, took place over the weekend.

Granted, at Wat Thai you'll often find food vendors selling things like papaya salad and skewers of barbecued meat at weekend festivals interspersed throughout the year, but it's only during Songkran when L.A.'s Thai community can enjoy the fruits of its most devoted home cooks in full force.

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G. Snyder

Did your new year's resolution involve sampling strange cuisine from across the city? If you're the type who scours the San Gabriel Valley like a Sichuan-studded Star Map or can quickly rattle off every birrieria in the barrio then probably not. But if you're perpetually stuck in a quaint Westside funk, haunted by cozy cafés and linen-lined bistros, we want to help you shake things up a bit. As Richard Dreyfuss once stressed to Bill Murray, baby steps are key.

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F. Friesema

Jonagold apples

Well, yes, Crispy Pork Gang. A restaurant. A Thai restaurant. In that Thai Town strip mall that somebody should have thought of a catchy name for by now, but anyway, the one with Ganda, Ruen Pair and Red Corner Asia in it, and a valet who will stack three cars behind you should you decide that you can park without his help.

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A. Froug

Crispy Catfish at Ganda Siamese Cuisine

Most good fried food is crispy. But crispy catfish at Ganda Siamese Cuisine is an entirely different fried animal: not really crispy at all. The fish is sliced up and fried past an inch of its life and covered in a fiery red paste full of galangal, chiles and Kaffir lime leaves, becoming a chewy, crunchy, pungent catfish jerky, more complex and heady than one could possibly expect to find on a steam table. The frying is so prolonged that almost all the moisture is drawn out, and its bones, all of which are left intact, become edible and brittle like hard candy.

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Anne Fishbein

Pla Pao with Japanese sea bass at Night and Market

In which Jonathan Gold ventures down Sunset Boulevard to Night and Market, the Thai market attached to Talesai, to find -- in a rather unlikely place -- street food.

Pork belly? Of course, flavored with fish sauce; sweet, fried ribs with garlic; and a huge pork hock braised in soy. The fried pig tails are as hard to leave alone as popcorn -- an 8-year-old of my acquaintance paused only briefly when he was informed that they weren't spareribs.

Read the complete story in Gold's Counter Intelligence, "Street Eats on Sunset," and check out Anne Fishbein's photo gallery. Then maybe get in your car.

T. Nguyen

Ruen Pair's Morning Glory

Morning glory, hollow as a reed and as deeply green as Robin Hood's cap, grows bountifully throughout the waters of Southeast Asia. Most Southeast Asian dishes, then, make ample use of morning glory in their cuisines in some way or another; one of the more popular morning glory dishes is Thailand's version, fried and tossed with copious chunks of garlic, chile, and any number of sauces (fish, oyster). For this edition of Food Fight, we set out to see whether Ruen Pair's famed fried morning glory dish stands supreme over next door neighbor Crispy Pork Gang & Grill's decidedly more crispy-porky version.

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G. Snyder

The Pupusa-Papaya Connection

The origins of this week's food mash-up trace back to a particularly reflective pupusa run a few weeks ago. To be clear, we love the pupusa in all it's crisp-edged, cheese-oozing glory, and given the ubiquitous status of the Salvadorian staple these days it's clear that its a populist favorite to boot (pupuseria may soon eclipse taqueria as the city's dominant -eria). Few things bring us more joy than a triple stack of pupusas piled high like Sunday morning pancakes.

One small qualm, or more accurately, one aspect with potential for improvement, is the toppings that usually accompany pupusas. There is curtido, the roughly chopped vinegared coleslaw that resembles something a hapless Latin line cook might whip up if pressed for a last-minute sauerkraut. Then there is the mild, watery salsa roja, a version far divorced from the fiery chile-spiked version commonplace in Mexico. Unlike their northern neighbors, many Central Americans aren't as keen on spice. Salvadoran salsa roja, even in its purest form, tastes remarkably similar to warmed over Campbell's seasoned with a handful of oregano.

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Our Venn Food Diagram series so far has hopscotched all over the globe, exploring Indian, Midwest American, and, most recently, Korean foods. As you probably can tell, this series is an organized chaos; our destinations are chosen in no particular order. Today, we randomly focus on Thailand to see what Los Angeles residents know about the country's cuisine, versus what foods Thais actually eat.

T. Nguyen

Moral of the story: Thai food is a staple in most Angelenos' monthly, if not weekly, diets. And while Angelenos generally know an impressive array of Thai dishes, many, by their own admission, actually only order an overly familiar routine of the same curries and noodle dishes. Sure, Los Angeles has many, many excellent bowls of yellow curry and exceptional plates of pad Thai, but there are plenty of eateries that showcase distinctly regional foods that are well worth exploring. Given that this vast culinary resource is literally right in our backyard, it would be a shame not to fully explore this richly flavored, deeply complex cuisine.

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G. Snyder

Laap Thawt + Lenbi Sandwich

The rules of D.I.Y. Food Mashups are simple: Pair two dishes from two distinct restaurants located less than a half mile apart and then sample the subsequent mishmash of cuisines, for better or worse.

In a crowded strip mall in East Hollywood, literally next door to one another, are Falafel Arax and Spicy Thai BBQ. The diversity of this particular neighborhood has led to many odd pairings over the years, but in the case of these two opposing eateries few are as skilled in their respective fields.

So, as much we would like to tell you that the idea for the Thai pork patty lebni sandwich arose from some chocolate and peanut butter style collision a lá Reese's, the development was much more pragmatic. We love Falafex Arax's lebni sandwich, a crisp Panini smeared with thick yogurt, olives, dried mint and tomato, the kind of sandwich that would cost double (or triple) in some posh Mediterranean café across town. We also love Spicy BBQ for their heavily seasoned Northern Thai dishes, one such being their lap thawt, fiery fried pork patties that look like something Farmer John would come up with if he spent a few years floating along the Mekong Delta.

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