Restaurant: NIGHT + MARKET Sahm
Location: 2533 Lincoln Blvd, Venice, CA 90291. (310) 301-0333
Date: April 21 & November 8, 2018
Cuisine: Thai
Rating: Good food, long lines, hipster clientelle
I’ve been meaning to try Night + Market for years — since they opened — but I never made it out to the Hollywood location.
So it’s great they opened one here in Venice, just a block from my friend Avi’s awesome Indian restaurant, Akbar.
The interior is like the fantasy of a kitchy beach Thai restaurant in Thailand. And in fact it is a beach Thai restaurant, just not in Thailand. But they certainly didn’t pull out the big bucks for all the plastic beads and Christmas lights. We waited about 45-50 minutes and we were fairly lucky, it looked like some people would be waiting easily over an hour.
The seating is very casual as well.
The menu is also formatted like a real Thai place, although the specific dishes are definitely California interesting.
There is only one beer on the menu, and they seem to be pushing wine — unusual for Thai.
Papaya salad. A bit spicy. Light and delicious.
World famous fried chicken sandwich. Chiengrai-style fried chicken thigh, papaya slaw, home-made ranch dressing, jalapeno, cilantro, tomato. Like a high(er) end Thai McDonald’s fried chicken sandwich! Haha.
Larb gai. Minced chicken, lime, fish sauce, rice powder, chili, cilantro, onion, spicy!
Classic spicy, salty, tangy, larb.
Coconut sticky rice. I love this
P.D.P. Peking Duck Pizza. Roast duck, garlic ginger hoisin, marinated shitake mushrooms, and mozzarella on grilled roti bread topped with green onion, sambal, and wonton chips.
Pork toro. Grilled fatty pig neck, salty like bacon, served with spicy ‘jaew’ northeastern chili dip. Chewy pork meat with that fat and tendon thing. Very tasty though.
Pastrami pad kee mao. Spicy drunken noodles with decadent Langer’s pastrami. Spicy! This was a fabulous combo of the pan fried rice noodles and the pastrami. Those green round things are pepper corns and VERY spicy. Great dish.
Khao soi rib. Mae sai curried noodles with pork spare ribs. I love Khao soi as it combines two of my favorite things: noodles and curry. This one was late (I think the server forgot it) but worth it. Nicely spicy, with lots of flavor. More a yellow curry than a red one.
Overall, I very much enjoyed Night + Market. Maybe not the wait out front, which was, for what it was, handled excellently, but certainly the food. It was pretty loud in there with lots of young Venice hipsters. Food was really tasty. Quite spicy. Certainly the best Thai I’ve had on the westside. I wish they were open at lunch. Might not be too bad on a weekday night though, hard to tell. But they don’t take reservations and it’s so loud, so would be hard to do a wine dinner there.
They are now open for lunch — which is great. I’ll have to go more often. Could even do at the end of one of my bike rides.
Also as a side note, testing out the iPhone X using Lightroom Mobile and raw to try to get better photos out of it — of course not nearly as good as my big Canon. Some of the daytime photos (from November) were on the iPhone XS (considerably better camera).