Our Favorite Thai Restaurant of the Year is Riffing on Italian, Indian, and Mexican Flavors — and It’s Glorious

Wedchayan “Deau” Arpapornnopparat’s goal for his restaurant Holy Basil was simply to be “the best Thai takeout” in downtown Los Angeles, which is no small feat in a city with hundreds of stellar Thai spots. Yet his unabashedly bold take on Thai food — bright, pungent, fiery, and complex — proved to be a hit. 

Getting the takeout business up and running out of a stall at a food hall mid-pandemic could have been enough for another chef, but not for Arpapornnopparat, a curious, restless — and, by his own admission, easily bored — chef who’s always looking for the next big challenge. So he opened up the food-hall space and started serving his wok-fired Bangkok-style street food on location; later, he put in windows where there was a wall, built some low-slung tables out of milk crates, and got some plastic stools to create a seating area. With scrappy and energetic vibes, it felt more like a night market than a food hall. 

Even that wasn’t enough. To keep things exciting for his team and to learn something new, Arpapornnopparat started doing ticketed pop-ups in the food hall. He’d serve sensational Thai dishes that you couldn’t find anywhere else in L.A., like marinated blue crab, alongside radically creative dishes like a Thai-inspired wild shrimp aguachile and a yellow curry rigatoni, a dazzling new-school mash-up pasta with Indian and Chinese influences, that gets topped with Szechuan peppercorns. Both have found their way to the restaurant’s regular menu.

A variety of influences can be felt at Holy Basil. Arpapornnopparat grew up in a Thai Chinese household, and many of the dishes channel his childhood, from a fluffy yet crispy omelet to a smoky wok-fired pad see ew. He spent six years in India, and his scratch-made curries blend Thai, Indian, and Chinese flavors. Tapping into the flavors of Los Angeles, Arpapornnopparat also incorporates Mexican ingredients, so you end up with dishes like the moo krob, a slab of crispy pork belly served with a bold sauce of Thai chiles and roasted tomatillo.

Grateful for the freedom and opportunity of being a chef in L.A., Arpapornnopparat appreciates the hungry, receptive diners who “expect that things are going to be a little bit different.”

The success of Holy Basil has enabled Arpapornnopparat to open a second location in the Atwater Village neighborhood, a 20-minute drive north of the original one downtown. He explains that it’s also a big, collaborative team effort, with his crew of Mexican, Chinese, and Thai cooks experimenting, working together, and applying everyone’s backgrounds to the food, which allows him to continue to stretch, evolve, and constantly push boundaries. “I feel like these are Thai dishes that nobody has made before,” he says. “Maybe the form changed a little bit, but it tastes super Thai.”

The perfect order at Holy Basil

Wild shrimp aguachile

Somewhere in between a Thai crudo and a Sinaloa-style aguachile verde — with a sauce that combines cilantro, tomatillo, chiles, and makrut lime — the wild shrimp aguachile at Holy Basil imagines what would happen if Thailand and Mexico shared a border. 

Grandma’s fish and rice

Inspired by a dish his grandma would make for him — in which flaky, crispy fried local rockfish gets hand-shredded and tossed with fluffy jasmine rice, Thai chiles, cilantro, culantro, garlic, shallot, smoked fish sauce, and lime — it’s essentially an enormous bowl of heady, delicate aromatics. Its popularity still surprises Arpapornnopparat. “To me, it tastes so homely. Even my sister said, ‘Oh, it tastes like Grandma’s.’”

Moo krob

Tapping into the flavors of Los Angeles, Arpapornnopparat incorporates Mexican influences in a genre-bending moo krob, where Kurobuta pork belly with a fluffy, crispy, chicharrón-like skin is served with what he calls the Holy Sauce, made from green and red Thai chiles, cilantro, lime, and roasted tomatillo.

Deau’s Way

Do it yourself

In the early days of Holy Basil, Arpapornnopparat did almost everything: “We used to do our own delivery. I used to cook, get on a bike, and then bike around downtown to deliver the food myself.” To create a space for guests to dine in at the original downtown location, Arpapornnopparat and his team knocked out parts of an interior wall to put in the windows themselves and built low-slung tables out of milk crates. “I always tell my team that we are going to do what we can for our guests,” he says. 

Reuse, reclaim, recycle

“We started with just one lowboy and a free wok from another restaurant because the food hall was abandoned,” Arpapornnopparat says of building out Holy Basil. “Rustic Canyon was throwing away their stovetop, and then my friend called and said, ‘Hey, there’s a stovetop. Do you want it?’ So I drove to go get it. So we started from there with a stovetop, one free wok, and one lowboy.”

Stand by your choices

The menu at Holy Basil says, “We politely decline substitutions or changes to the menu to preserve the integrity of the dish.” Arpapornnopparat explains, “We only do one spice level, and we already picked the right amount. Sometimes people say they want ‘spice level three.’ I have no idea what that means.”