{"id":5058,"date":"2024-10-08T23:14:04","date_gmt":"2024-10-08T15:14:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.marga.org\/foodblog\/?p=5058"},"modified":"2024-10-08T23:14:07","modified_gmt":"2024-10-08T15:14:07","slug":"l-a-chow-lum-ka-naad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marga.org\/foodblog\/2024\/10\/l-a-chow-lum-ka-naad\/","title":{"rendered":"L.A. Chow: Lum Ka Naad"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

An exploration of Northern and Southern Thai cuisines<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Los Angeles is a great city for Thai food. It’s in LA where I first became acquainted with Thai food, and I’ve had many a memorable Thai meal there. While Thai restaurants have become common in the Bay Area over the last three decades, and we have several ones even in San Leandro, there is still something special about LA Thai food.

Lum Ka Naad<\/a><\/strong> is not your ordinary Thai restaurant. It has an extremely extensive menu offering stereotypical Thai dishes as well as classics from other parts of Asia. More interestingly, they also offer a handful of unique dishes from Northern and Southern Thailand, allowing you to explore Thai cuisine more thoroughly. We visited the restaurant during our last visit to my family in the SF Valley, and I’m sure well return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The restaurant itself is pretty casual, though more by juxtaposition than design. The dining area, if isolated, would be somewhat elegant. It’s decorated with non-garish pieces of Thai art. Alas, the bar\/check out and their staging area, including where they keep their carts, are all open to the dining room and bring down the elegance factor by several notches. So just think casual.
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We started dinner with an appetizer of beef satay<\/strong> ($15), which was delicious. It brought me back when I was first introduced to the dish so many decades ago. The beef is marinated in a curry then grilled and served with peanut sauce. Both the beef and sauce were on point. It’s been years since I last ordered satay – and I realize now that it’s because many restaurants don’t provide a beef option, and chicken or pork satay can be very dry. The beef was tender and didn’t suffer that problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We also shared an appetizer of angel wings<\/strong> ($16). These are boneless chicken wings stuffed with a mixture of ground chicken and glass noodles, then battered and fried. It was a very substantial dish, and I thought it was tasty though not out of this world delicious. Mike liked it more, I think. We took most of this home and reheated it a couple of days later, it stood up to time and microwaving quite well. Still, I wouldn’t order it again, though Mike might.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For dinner, I had the larb kua<\/strong> ($17) from the northern menu. Larb<\/a> or laab, is a dish of Lao origins that has been adopted and modified in some areas of northern Thailand. I’d never had the northern Thai version, in which the meat is marinated with spices and then pan fried.

It was very tasty. It’s not a huge dish, and I actually finished it all, but I really enjoyed it. I had it with ground beef, but you can choose ground pork or chicken instead. The spicing was delicious and the texture added by the garlic was great.
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Mike had the sator & shrimp<\/strong> ($20), a dish consisting of sator beans saut\u00e9ed with shrimp, ground pork and a shrimp paste sauce. Sator beans<\/a>, also known as stinky beans for their strong, foul aroma, are a feature of southern Thai cuisine. The dish was pretty spicy, but Mike thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a new flavor combination for him, pungent to say the least. The problem were the leftovers. They stank up my mother’s refrigeration and led her to ban us from using it in the future. The smell lasted even after the leftovers were consumed and she cleaned the fridge. If you order this, make sure to eat it all and don’t take it home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My sister had the panang curry with chicken<\/strong> ($17). This was a good but not extraordinary version of this dish – but this is a dish so good that it’s hard to make any better. She enjoyed it quite a bit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My nice, meanwhile, had the orange chicken<\/strong> ($16.50), but with with tofu<\/strong> instead of chicken. Made this way, this Chinese favorite is vegan. She enjoyed that it had been made with actual oranges, and remarked on the freshness of the flavor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Service was great, our waitress was very attentive and cheerful, and helped us navigate the long menu.

We definitely enjoyed our meal and would return. There is a second Lum Ka Naad<\/a><\/strong> location in Encino, for those closer to that area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lum Ka Naad<\/a><\/strong> 
8910 Reseda Blvd,
Northridge, CA
(818) 882-3028
Mon - Sun : 11:00 am - 10:00 pm<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Los Angeles Restaurant Reviews<\/a><\/strong>

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An exploration of Northern and Southern Thai cuisines Los Angeles is a great city for Thai food. It’s in LA where I first became acquainted with Thai food, and I’ve had many a memorable Thai meal there. While Thai restaurants have become common in the Bay Area over the last three decades, and we have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4995,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[155,337,28,338,110],"class_list":["post-5058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-restaurants","tag-los-angeles","tag-northridge","tag-reviews","tag-san-fernando-valley","tag-thai","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marga.org\/foodblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marga.org\/foodblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marga.org\/foodblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marga.org\/foodblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marga.org\/foodblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.marga.org\/foodblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marga.org\/foodblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marga.org\/foodblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marga.org\/foodblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marga.org\/foodblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}