Los Angeles is home to the largest Thai population outside of Thailand. With a relatively recent history of immigration to the United States dating to 1965, reports estimate that 80,000 Thais make their home in Southern California. In spite of its brief history in the United States, the Thai community in Los Angeles has already left its mark on the city. While the proliferation of Thai-owned businesses and shops has converted East Hollywood and some San Fernando Valley neighborhoods to destinations for cultural tourism, the Thai community in Los Angeles County reverberates still from global attention over the 1995 El Monte human trafficking case. The great popularity of Thai cuisine, textiles, and cultural festivals continues to preserve, enrich, and showcase one of Asias most distinctive cultures.

Los Angeles is home to the largest Thai population outside of Thailand. With a relatively recent history of immigration to the United States dating to 1965, reports estimate that 80,000 Thais make their home in Southern California. In spite of its brief history in the United States, the Thai community in Los Angeles has already left its mark on the city. While the proliferation of Thai-owned businesses and shops has converted East Hollywood and some San Fernando Valley neighborhoods to destinations for cultural tourism, the Thai community in Los Angeles County reverberates still from global attention over the 1995 El Monte human trafficking case. The great popularity of Thai cuisine, textiles, and cultural festivals continues to preserve, enrich, and showcase one of Asia's most distinctive cultures.

"One night in Bangkok" : food and the everyday life of empire -- "Chasing the yum" : food procurement and early Thai Los Angeles -- Too hot to handle? restaurants and Thai American identity -- "More than a place of worship" : food festivals and Thai American suburban culture -- Thailand's "77th province" : culinary tourism in Thai Town

If you love to eat Thai food, but don’t know how to cook it, Kris Yenbamroong wants to solve your problems. His brash style of spicy, sharp Thai party food is created, in part, by stripping down traditional recipes to wring maximum flavor out of minimum hassle. Whether it’s a scorching hot crispy rice salad, lush coconut curries, or a wok-seared pad Thai, it’s all about demystifying the universe of Thai flavors to make them work in your life. Kris is the chef of Night + Market, and this cookbook is the story of his journey from the Thai-American restaurant classics he grew eating at his family’s restaurant, to the rural cooking of Northern Thailand he fell for traveling the countryside. But it’s also a story about how he came to question what authenticity really means, and how his passion for grilled meats, fried chicken, tacos, sushi, wine and good living morphed into an L.A. Thai restaurant with a style all its own.

The Gold Standard for Authentic Thai Cuisine In this showstopping collection of must-try Thai dishes, culinary mastermind and bestselling author Jet Tila opens up the world of his Thai heritage for today’s home cooks with recipes that are authentic, accessible and ultra-craveable. Jet partners up with Tad Weyland Fukumoto, longtime friend and fellow chef, to channel their years of Southeast Asian culinary prowess into mouthwatering recipes, such as Street-Style Basil Pork, Glass Noodle Stir-Fry, Hung Lay Northern Pork Curry, New Thai BBQ Chicken, Fried Tilapia with Three-Flavor Sauce and so many more. They’ve tirelessly perfected these recipes to ensure that their flavors, techniques and quality rank number one across the board—the true gold standard. With dishes ranging from tantalizing classics and popular street foods to unsung heroes spanning the regions, this cookbook is your one-stop guide to the rich culinary traditions of Thailand. Jet also presents an exciting collection of plant-based takes on popular dishes to welcome everyone to the table and show the range of possibilities in the modern Thai kitchen. Fire up your wok and get hungry for 101 of the best damn Thai dishes you’ll ever have.

Celebrity chef, Asian cooking expert and TV personality Jet Tila has compiled the best-of-the-best 101 Eastern recipes that every home cook needs to try before they die! The dishes are authentic yet unique to Jet--drawn from his varied cooking experience, unique heritage and travels. The dishes are also approachable--with simplified techniques, weeknight-friendly total cook times and ingredients commonly found in most urban grocery stores today.

With a uniquely balanced combination of salty, sweet, sour, and spicy flavors, Thai food burst onto Los Angeles’s and America’s culinary scene in the 1980s. Flavors of Empire examines the rise of Thai food and the way it shaped the racial and ethnic contours of Thai American identity and community. Full of vivid oral histories and new archival material, this book explores the factors that made foodways central to the Thai American experience. Starting with American Cold War intervention in Thailand, Mark Padoongpatt traces how informal empire allowed U.S. citizens to discover Thai cuisine abroad and introduce it inside the United States. When Thais arrived in Los Angeles, they reinvented and repackaged Thai food in various ways to meet the rising popularity of the cuisine in urban and suburban spaces. Padoongpatt opens up the history and politics of Thai food for the first time, all while demonstrating how race emerges in seemingly mundane and unexpected places.