Jitlada Hollywood: The Real Taste of Thai

Earlier this week a friend of mine sent me an LA Times review of Jitlada, a small little restaurant off of Sunset- nestled into a strip mall (oh Hollywood, how I love you). Though I consider myself a semi-sophisticated epicurean, I confess that I have never tasted "Southern Thai" food before. Southern Thai cuisine is known for its use of turmeric (the fresh kind) and just overall pungent, spicy, dishes unlike anything I have ever tasted.

First order of business: read that review. It has every directive you will want to know before you enter that restaurant.

Three things we want to reiterate:

-DO NOT ORDER from ANY part of the menu besides the very back, the "specials" menu.

-If you like spice (and not just that 'hits you immediately' pepper spice but the kind of spice that creeps up on you after a few bites, the spicy that makes you feel like you may be on hallucinogenics), you will LOVE Jitlada's vast array of southern thai dishes- so try a few! .

-Make sure you enter knowing you will be spending the better part of your evening

there. Yes, service can be a little spotty...but it is well worth the wait. Here's why...

Our first dish was a perfect summery salad: deep fried catfish (though very light and airy to taste, despite the way it was cooked) over a bed of julienned mango and greens. This was actually my least favorite dish of the night- a testament to how amazing the meal carried on.

The simple glass table tops are those you will find in many Chinese restaurants all over the area; for Jitlada, they serve as free publicity. Among the four magazine excerpts underneath our table top was one from LA Weekly voting the steamed muscles as one of the Top 10 dishes in LA in 2007. That was our next dish- duh. Though simply cooked, the broth the muscles were served in was absolutely deep, rich, and divine. That broth took my breath away by combining the savoriness of the broth in a good bowl of Pho, with a spicy kick I've only tasted before in Indian cooking.

Finally, the pièce de résistance: Sator Bean with Lamb (No. 121). If you have a tolerance for a bit of pain, this dish is quite possibly on my list of Top 5 dishes I've ever had. In my life. The lamb: cooked to perfection. The sator beans and that spicy sauce is what made it, though. Upon first taste, both my friend and I thought it was one of the most flavorful mouthfuls we had ever come across. Three bites later, both our eyes were watering in gleeful pain, our bodies not knowing if we wanted more or if it this reaction was our bodies telling us to stop eating.

Oh, one more thing: beer, water (lots of it), and some brown rice make this meal much more pleasant. Go with friends, be ready to sweat (think of it as a culinary form of detox), and engage with Jazz (the owner) to make sure you are getting the best Jitlada has to offer.