About
The difference matters.
What's cooked here isn't what's eaten in Luang Prabang. It's what Lao families made after they left — in camps, in new countries, with the wrong ingredients and the right memory. The seafood sukiyaki is my mother's recipe, worked out at a stall in a refugee camp in Thailand, before I was born, to help keep the family fed.
That's the lineage. It's smaller and stranger than "Lao food," and it's the only thing I can honestly claim.
My mother sold food out of a car
She was the Lao food lady for Northern Virginia, DC, and Maryland, and she still is. Temple events, house parties, holidays. She'd bring jerky, sauces, pickles, whole trays of things, and after the ceremony ended and the party got going she'd send me out to the car to carry it in.
I was mortified every time. She never was once.
She cooks like an inventor — always curious about somebody else's ingredient, always working out how to bend it toward a Lao flavor. Nothing measured, ever.
I moved to Los Angeles at eighteen and got homesick
Not for a place. For a taste.
So I started cooking from memory. Asking my mother for a recipe was useless — no measurements, and the instructions came out as a beautiful mess. I stopped writing them down and started treating them as clues, filling the gaps with recipes off the internet and technique off television. Nobody could afford cable, so everyone watched Food Network. Most people watched it. I took notes.
Flavor came from her. Technique came from TV. The rest was craving.
The first pop-up was in my backyard
I was a party animal living at ground zero in West Hollywood, with a standalone guest house and a decent patio. My place was the pregame and the after-party, every weekend.
I've always loved hosting — I came up in high-end guest service and event design, so feeding people was reflex. And I was funding Lao cultural work out of my own pocket, badly. So I started asking friends for a few dollars for the food.
I had no idea that was a pop-up. I didn't know pop-ups existed. It was a fundraising scheme with good food.
Then it became a business, and then it wasn't one
My mother's Lao beef jerky was the thing my friends always asked me to have shipped from her. Eventually I asked for the recipe. She gave it to me, I made it myself, and the orders kept coming until it was a real company.
That company ended, and not by my choice.
What I had left was gig work and friends who cared. One asked me to cook his birthday and offered to pay. His guests hired me next. Their friends after that. Venues started offering me their space.
Nobody told me any of this had a name.
Hey Hey's patio, and then the night market
The first real pop-up ran on the patio of Hey Hey, a milk tea shop in LA. Best tea I've had, and they're still open — go. A stranger with no restaurant and no idea what he was doing asked to take over their patio, and they said yes. Everything after this happened because they did.
The menu was Lao noodle soups and nothing else. We called it PhoLaosophy. Three weeks, each busier than the last. One evening near closing a line appeared out of nowhere — someone from the LA Times had eaten there earlier and posted about it. I didn't know food writers were something that happened to you.
Not long after, the LA Times put us in Food Bowl. First time vending, established restaurants on every side, and I was certain we'd lose money. We sold out nearly every night.
Pop-ups nearly every year since. A truck through COVID. Ten months in a shared kitchen in Chinatown in 2023.
I'm not a chef, I'm your host
I'm a home cook. An obsessed one.
Chef is a title people earn — through study, through the line, through somebody else conferring it. It's the difference between a doctorate and an honorary one, and I know which I've got.
Think of it this way instead: I'm hosting, and I happen to be in the kitchen. You came by the house, I'm cooking, sit down. That's the feeling I'm after, whether it's a market stall or your own dining table.
I don't want a restaurant. I never have. I want to cook, to host, to watch people eat, and to talk about where the food comes from.
Why Lao food
Because my real work is keeping Lao culture alive, and food is the only door that opens on its own.
Talk to someone cold about cultural preservation and watch their eyes go. Put something extraordinary in their mouth and they'll ask where it's from. Then where Laos is. Then who the people are, and what the music sounds like.
That's the whole strategy. Feed people first. It's the same job when the cooking stops — I've consulted on film and television when someone needed a Lao detail to be right, catered a Netflix set, and styled the food for The Harvest.
About the name
Yum Sະlut is a Lao pun, and it's tamer than it looks.
Yum is salad in Lao. Sະlut is how Lao says lettuce, and the word came in through French — the same root that gave English salad. The two words split somewhere along the way: salad became the whole dish, Sະlut became the leaf.
So the name means lettuce salad. Or, if you like, salad salad. It's also one of my favorite things my mother made when I was a kid.
The ະ is a Lao vowel character. It's why it's pronounced yum seh-lut.
I'll admit I enjoy the double-take. But the reason I kept it is quieter. It's one word doing two entirely different things depending on which language you're reading it in — and if you only know one, you'll be certain you know what it says. Back up far enough and it's a different animal than the one you thought you were looking at.
A few people have written about it
"Each beautifully plated dish slaps you in the face with excellence."
Eat the World Los AngelesFour out of five stars — the refugee sukiyaki called "complex, flavorful and all-around delicious."
Time Out Los Angeles"A tight menu of Lao culinary hits while shining a light on the vibrancy of its culture."
Eater LANamed among the paper's favorite new restaurants in downtown L.A.
Los Angeles TimesA temple to Lao food
No dish has an owner. There's no first cook, no founding year, no country that got there first — only the chicken and the egg, and a very long argument nobody wins. Everyone has a right to the food. Nobody has a right to place it.
So this isn't a claim. It's an homage.
To the grandmothers and the mothers. The aunties. The home cooks. The street vendors and the backyard vendors and the ones working out of a car at a temple festival. Everyone who kept it alive by making it again.
To the sound of a mortar and pestle, which is the sound of the food still being here.
And to the people who show up and eat it. You keep the story written.
Lao culture will only ever be as strong as the preservation of its food. The stories pass grandmother to child over a ball of sticky rice, and whatever we survive gets carried on the back of what we cook. If Lao culture ever goes, the food will be the last thing to go.
Whatever you need Lao food for, we'll cook it
We're based in Los Angeles and take bookings in the DC area too. Eight at a table, an office lunch, a temple hall, a wedding, a memorial. Private chef and catering run through one form, and holidays fill early — ask sooner than feels necessary.
The chili oil is in the market. Every jar keeps the rest of this going.
This page is the food. For more about Thip — the whole of it, not just the kitchen — visit tharathip.com.
In the Lao Kitchen
Where the cooking gets explained. What padaek actually is. How to build a jeow. Why sticky rice is steamed and never boiled. What to do with a jar of chili crisp once the noodles are gone.
Read it →The Lao Food Guide
A directory — Lao restaurants across the country, where to buy the ingredients, and events worth driving for. Not ours. Anybody's. Send us one and we'll list it. Lao food winning anywhere is Lao food winning.
Open the guide →Where We're Cooking
Our dates, and where to ask us to turn up at something of yours.
See the dates →The rest is just food. Come eat it.