critic’s notebook
At Luv2Eat Express, a chance to try the dishes before you order makes for some unexpectedly enlightening moments.
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Tejal Rao is a critic at large for Food. She lives in Los Angeles.
What was I in the mood to eat? Pacing inside Luv2Eat Express, a Thai restaurant in Hollywood, I sized up a dozen steel vats shimmering with curries and braises. A server behind the counter saw me agonizing over which three dishes to choose.
“You can taste,” he said cheerfully, gesturing toward a stack of tiny bowls. Imagine an ice-cream parlor with unlimited tastes, a scooper who wanted you to try as many things as possible. It was generous, impractical, thrilling.
For obvious reasons, this is not how choosing what to order at a restaurant usually works. It’s so far from how it works that it took me a minute to get comfortable requesting a sample (and then another, and another). Looking, I thought I would order the massaman curry, turmeric-stained and thick with coconut milk. I would have been content with it.
But tasting revealed there was more to lunch than just being content. There was, if I could tune into something below the surface, if I could match my order to the precise shape of my own appetites, the possibility of flying, gamy rapture.
I found my way to the crisp-edged cross cuts of fried catfish smeared with a dark and brilliant red curry paste, jacked with shrimp paste, radiating with the freshness of lemongrass and makrut; the green curry with wilted basil leaves and pieces of chicken on the bone; and the braised pork belly capped with fat that practically smudged away under the tines of a fork, its dark broth sweet up front, but slowly revealing the hotter, more intricate parts of itself.
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