For Laotian food in the LA area, Kop Jai Lai is a singular treat

Like the Thai-Cambodian restaurants of Long Beach’s Cambodia Town, Kop Jai Lai — one of the few Laotian restaurants in SoCal — opts to add a lot of Thai dishes to its menu, to make it more user friendly to those unfamiliar with the cooking of this land-locked land surrounded by Vietnam, Thailand, China and Myanmar (Burma).

It’s actually reminiscent of how early Thai restaurants were Chinese-Thai, because back then, we knew our chow mein, but pad Thai was a mystery. It sure isn’t anymore.

And indeed, the cooking of Laos isn’t a mystery either, not after eating several decades of Thai cooking. There are points of difference, of course, many of them subtleties not obvious to the casual eater. (As I often point out, nationalities may recognize borders and boundaries, but cuisine never does.)

So, for instance, at Kop Jai Lai there are two papaya salads on the menu — one Thai, the other Laotian. The Thai version is a bit sweeter, flavored with dried shrimp and peanuts. The Laotian is more sour, more astringent, with the more intense mouth hit that comes from black crab paste, sour plums, and a fermented fish sauce called padeak. They’re both familiar to those of us who have eaten (and adored) papaya salad for years. But the Thai version is more familiar. And honestly, without the smattering of chopped peanuts, the salad seems to be missing something I’m so accustomed to. Understated…but still there.

What’s added to the menu — the singular ingredient that really sets Laotian cooking apart — is sticky rice. Laos has the highest consumption of sticky rice in the world, eating 377 pounds per person annually. That’s more than a pound of sticky rice per person per day, which is staggering.

According to Wikipedia, “Sticky rice is deeply ingrained in the culture, religious tradition and national identity of Laos. It is a common belief within the Lao community that no matter where they are in the world, sticky rice will always be the glue that holds the Lao communities together…the Lao will refer to themselves as luk khao niaow, which can be translated as ‘children or descendants of sticky rice.’”

And it’s one of the three defining dishes — along with papaya salad and the chopped meat dish called larb, which like the papaya salad is flavored with fish sauce.

Interestingly, when I walked into the restaurant, I noticed a long tables of about a dozen regulars, eating a mountain of dishes. I asked them which Lao dish they couldn’t live without. They told me the khao poon curry chicken, which is a big stew pot of chicken in yellow curry paste, coconut milk, potatoes, carrots, vermicelli noodles, cabbage and bean sprouts. They were eating it over sticky rice. Of course.

Kop Jai Lai sits in a Mission Hills strip mall, that’s dominated by Clean King, one of the biggest laundromats I’ve ever seen, open 24 hours because…it is. The restaurant, a handsome, well-tended room, was almost completely full on a Sunday night. And that population spoke volumes about the wondrous diversity of the SF Valley. For though this was a Thai-Lao restaurant, virtually everyone in the restaurant was Latino.