Jitlada

Excerpt from “Tinsletown Thai” by Coleman Andrews, originally published in Gourmet Magazine in July 2008  Read Complete Article Here

“I loved Thai food the first time I tasted it. It seemed to me to bear the same relationship to Chinese food that Italian did to French: It was simpler and more immediately satisfying, and it let the raw materials show through more vividly. And I thought Jitlada did it better than anyone. Named after the royal palace in Bangkok, Jitlada opened in the late ’70s and quickly earned an enthusiastic following among food lovers both Thai and otherwise. All went well until the late ’90s, when the restaurant’s original owners sold the place and returned to Thailand.

Then, in 2006, the restaurant changed hands again. The new owners were Sarintip “Jazz” Singsanong and her brother Suthiporn “Tui” Sungkamee, two of 12 siblings from the ancient province of Nakhon Si Thammarat, in southern Thailand, near the Malaysian border—also the home province, coincidentally, of Jitlada’s previous owners. Singsanong, the first of her family to immigrate to the U.S.—she arrived in 1979 with the proverbial (as she says) “two hundred dollars and one suitcase”—had studied hotel management in Bangkok. She enrolled at L.A. City College to learn English and found part-time jobs in local restaurants before landing a job at the Biltmore Hotel. Little by little, she brought her family over, and she and Tui, who owned four restaurants in Thailand, began working with another brother, John, at a Thai restaurant in Westwood called Emporium, which is still in business. “We couldn’t really do authentic home cooking there,” says Singsanong, “because our customers didn’t like things too spicy.” Her dream was to have a restaurant that could and that would offer Tui a showcase for his talents. When Jitlada became available,  they took it over.