Chao Krung Thai Restaurant Revives Roots with Curry Night

Small ceramic vats of curry sit crowded on the table, steam still rising off rice noodles beside them, their funky aroma enough to make a hungry stomach growl before a single bite. This is Wednesday night at Chao Krung Thai Restaurant, Los Angeles's oldest existing Thai restaurant, where a new weekly tradition is quietly restoring a menu to roots it was once forced to hide.

A Restaurant Born from Compromise

When Chao Krung opened in 1969, Thai food was so unfamiliar to Angelenos that its owners had to lean on Chinese dishes just to get customers through the door. "My mom had a chalkboard, barbecue chicken, wonton soup, chow mein," recalled Amanda Maneesilasan of her mother, Supa Kuntee. "She'd start seeing people coming in, and then slowly introduce them to something Thai." That slow introduction, dish by dish, defined the restaurant's earliest years, serving L.A.'s scattered Thai community long before Thai Town existed as a neighborhood.

Three Locations, One Family

Boon and Supa Kuntee, along with Supa's sister Nillaung, opened the first Chao Krung on Western Avenue shortly after arriving in California. A second location followed on Hollywood Boulevard, where the same Chinese menu holdovers stuck around out of necessity. It was only with the restaurant's third location, opened on Fairfax Avenue in 1972, that Chao Krung began taking the shape it holds today, its clientele eventually growing alongside staffers from nearby CBS Television City as Thai food moved into the American mainstream.

The Second Generation Takes Over

Maneesilasan and her sister Katy Noochlaor grew up inside that restaurant, doing homework between tables and playing behind the building. Stepping in as owners in 2017 felt inevitable. "We knew we would take over the restaurant," Noochlaor said. "We live and breathe that restaurant." What they inherited still carried traces of their parents' original compromise, and restoring the menu to its Thai roots became their defining project.

A Grandmother's Recipe as Turning Point

For Maneesilasan, learning to make green curry from her grandmother marked a genuine turning point in understanding the cuisine she grew up around but hadn't fully claimed as her own craft. That recipe now anchors the restaurant's new weekly Kanom Jeen Curry Night, held Wednesdays only.

What Arrives at the Table

The trio features Gang Kieaow Waan Gai, the grandmother's green curry made with chicken, coconut curry base, fresh herbs, Thai eggplant and chili. Mae's Nam Ya Trout, the most labor intensive of the three at roughly five hours to prepare, layers tender trout into a Southern Thai coconut curry built on house ground red curry paste. The Nam Prik brings roasted chili and smoky herbs with nutty peanut undertones. "Curry is so important in Thai culture, it's part of our tradition," Maneesilasan said, adding of the trout curry specifically, "I can guarantee you can't find this anywhere else."

A Family Expanding Without Losing Its Center

Beyond Chao Krung, the sisters have built Tuk Tuk Thai and Ban Ban Burger, with a second Ban Ban location opening this fall directly beside Chao Krung, an archway replacing the wall between them, joining two generational concepts under one roof.

What began as a chalkboard menu built to ease strangers into an unfamiliar cuisine has become, more than fifty years later, a family reclaiming exactly what their parents once had to soften. The curry night is not nostalgia. It is correction, served hot, one Wednesday at a time.

More information is available on the official website at chaokrung.com. Further reading on the restaurant industry is available at hospitalitycareerprofile.com.