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.
Noree Burapapituk and Somruthai Kaewtathip, Phuket-born chefs who go by Pla and Fern, run the charming Luv2Eat Thai Bistro in the same Hollywood strip mall. They opened this counter last year in a former Subway.
It’s a small, informal, no-frills restaurant where you gather your own silverware, bus your own table, and consider such a routine and repetitive question, you might not realize how often you’re outsourcing the answer. What are you in the mood to eat?
Think about it now, without the distraction of images and videos, without the cheese pulls, ombre drinks, oozy yolks and extra-long noodles.
If you follow food sites and influencers, the algorithmic recommendations you’re immersed in across digital platforms blur into identical waves of dishes and drinks, a series of must-orders and micro-trends that flow into each other so quickly, there’s not much time to think about what you might actually feel like eating.
Luv2Eat Express offers a compelling exercise in listening carefully to your own hankerings and impressions. It’s great practice for what, in therapist speak, might be called “taking a moment to check in with yourself.”
Taste and you’ll find that the moody goblin of your own desire knows exactly what it wants. It doesn’t care so much about what looks good on camera, or what went viral, or what’s in for 2025.
The goblin is alive and well and it operates not only outside of the algorithmic feeds, but outside of logic and language. It has no motive, no strategy, but your own pleasure. Listening to it, over and over again, will reconnect you with your own mood and feelings and sense of taste.
“Maybe something is too spicy or too salty or they don’t like it, but they can choose,” said Ms. Burapapituk, when I asked why she’d trained staff to offer tastes. She wanted diners to know exactly what they were getting into, to be happy with their choices. “I just want people to know what they like,” she said.
As a critic, I thought that I did. But every time I go to Luv2Eat Express, I’m taken by surprise.
The fried fish in curry paste — sometimes mackerel, sometimes catfish — changes, and while I want every version, I’ve also found myself drawn to the bitter melon soup, softened by a confetti of unlikely vegetables including pickled daikon, as well a fermented fish curry in a thin, scintillating broth.
Last week, Ms. Burapapituk added a small menu of noodle dishes, cooked to order in the narrow kitchen hidden behind the steam trays. A restaurant must draw the line somewhere — Luv2Eat doesn’t offer a taste of these.
But if you’ve been slowing down a bit to consult with yourself and getting good at gauging your own appetites, then you won’t need one. You’ll know exactly what you want.
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