A new Thai-Lao restaurant in Parkside is a delicious discovery

The city is expensive, but your next meal doesn’t have to be. The $25 Diner hunts down the best restaurants where you can eat like royalty for a song.

Sometimes, a little spot opens without pomp on a quiet city block, and from the moment you enter, you can tell someone there cares. The menu is nicely laid out. The staff are kind. There are a few thoughtful decorative touches, even if it’s in the form of fake plants. And when the food arrives, it hits home, even if you’ve never quite had the likes of it.

This is the case at Chaa Roen Pohn, which opened a month ago a block from Stern Grove, in the Parkside neighborhood. The main menu is Thai, but there is also a special little Lao menu, featuring cuisine not as easily found in San Francisco. In comparison to Thai food, I’d call it same same but different. It is not surprising that the countries share a border.

Owners Kanjana “Ana” Sankad, Saknarong Wiengyankung, and Mimi Pohn are all natives of Thailand who met in San Francisco while working at various Thai restaurants. Pohn, whose family is Laotian, is the new restaurant’s chef and namesake. They are all Buddhist, Sankad explains, and “chaa roen” means “blessing.” 

Chaa Roen Pohn is the kind of restaurant I could have easily just skipped by — a reminder that the city is full of discoveries. Though their website has the head-scratching tagline “Where Curry Meets Jazz,” the night I visit with a friend, country singer Morgan Wallen is on the playlist, crooning about getting drunk on love. Chaa Roen Pohn’s beer and wine application hasn’t come through yet, so we opt for pandan tea. It turns out that love will have to be the only form of intoxication.

However, my heart is filled from the first slurp of Kao Piak ($16), a soup made with a silken pork-and-ginger-infused chicken broth with slippery rice noodles; sliced, springy pork loaf (imagine fishcake but pig); little chunks of bone-in spare ribs; and crispy onions floating on top. It is simple but soulful. I do some swooning. It’s what you want on a fog-whipped Parkside night. Pohn hand-pulls the noodles daily, though the rest of the kitchen crew is trying to learn how to do it. “It’s not easy,” says Peter Sorsrisuphan, who helps in the kitchen. 

There is also Por Laos ($18): familiar, tasty, crispy fried spring rolls with ground pork, lettuce, herbs, and vermicelli. But the Mhok Pla ($15) is something I’d never had before. For it, pieces of catfish filet, chiles, sticky rice powder, garlic, and a ton of dill (an herb you’ll commonly find in the food of Laos and northeastern Thailand) are steamed in a banana leaf. By the time the dill has cooked, it resembles a kind of swamp weed. Do not let this deter you. The dish is spicy and aromatic and comforting — a special kind of fugly-delicious. Get rice, sticky or jasmine, to go with it.

As with Thai food, there a selection of salads. The Nam Kao Tod ($16) is particularly addictive, made with chunks of crispy, toasted rice tossed with red onions, cilantro, and sour pork sausage, called sam moo, which is fermented for a week until a little tangy. Another salad, Soup Nor Mai ($14), comprising a pile of tender, thinly shredded bamboo shoots with chiles and rice powder, is laborious to make, says Sorsrisuphan. Bamboo requires repeated boiling to get rid of the bitter toxin cyanogenic glycoside.

The only thing I try from the Thai side of the menu is a bracing hot and sour soup afloat with chicken feet, a perfect flu remedy (for diners who don’t fear a claw or three). But I intend to return for the Som Tum, or papaya salad, which comes in four variations.

Sankad says the clientele has been a mix from the neighborhood: “Chinese, American, and Lao.” The existence of the latter she learned only by opening the restaurant — a discovery of her own. “I didn’t even know that there are a lot of Lao people here.” 

The Standard suggests:
The food here is best shared. Try this meal for two.

Mhok Pla (steamed catfish with dill) $15
Nam Kao Tod (crispy rice salad) $16
Kao Piak (rice noodle soup) $16
Total: $47