If your restaurants near me search lands you in Thai Town, the stretch of Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset east of Normandie, you are in the only officially designated Thai Town in the United States. Jitlada sits in a strip mall on Sunset and has the neighbourhood's most persistent reputation, built almost entirely on a menu section that a lot of customers never open.
The southern menu at Jitlada rewards planning and punishes guessing, especially on heat. Ask Karpo which Thai Town kitchens are open tonight and what to order if you want the southern list rather than the standard one.
Two menus, one kitchen
The standard menu is what most American Thai restaurants serve: pad thai, green curry, satay, the dishes that travelled. The second menu is southern Thai, the cooking of the peninsula toward the Malaysian border, and it is a different cuisine with different flavour architecture. More turmeric, more dried chilli, more fermented seafood, considerably less sugar.
Jacqueline and Suthiporn Sungkamee built the southern list after taking over the restaurant in the 2000s, drawing on family cooking from Songkhla province. It has grown over the years into a long list of dishes that you will not find easily elsewhere in California, and it is the reason the restaurant has a national reputation rather than a local one.
Ask for the southern menu explicitly. It is not hidden, but the default assumption at the door is that a new customer wants the familiar list, and nobody will push you toward the harder food unless you ask.
The heat is real and it is not the point
Southern Thai cooking is genuinely the hottest regional cuisine in Thailand, and the versions here are not softened for the American palate unless you request it. But heat is not the achievement. The achievement is that underneath the chilli there is a great deal of specific flavour: sour tamarind, bitter greens, funky shrimp paste, fresh turmeric that tastes nothing like the powder.
If you order at full heat on a first visit you will taste almost none of that. Ask for medium, which here means considerably hotter than medium anywhere else, and work up on a second visit. The staff are used to calibrating and will tell you honestly which dishes cannot be made mild without ruining them.
What to actually order
Kua kling is the clearest introduction: dry-fried minced meat with a turmeric-heavy southern curry paste, almost no liquid, intensely aromatic. It shows the spice profile without a coconut-milk cushion softening everything.
Beyond that, the crispy morning glory salad is the dish people photograph, deep-fried water spinach heaped into a crisp tangle and dressed with a sharp, sweet, hot dressing. Order it early, because it loses its texture within minutes of arriving. Southern-style curries with fish are the third pillar, and the sour orange curry is the one that regulars argue about.
Portion sizes are moderate, so a table of two should order three dishes plus rice. Order rice generously. It is not a side here so much as the temperature control for everything else on the table.
The room and the reality of a strip mall
The restaurant is in a small strip mall on Sunset with a parking lot in front, and the dining room is compact, brightly lit and covered in years of accumulated press clippings and photographs. It is not a design statement and does not pretend to be. Tables turn reasonably fast at lunch and much more slowly at dinner.
There is no meaningful bar programme, which means this is a food-first evening rather than a long one. Thai iced tea, beer or a soft drink is the realistic pairing, and for food this hot the cold sweet tea does more useful work than wine would.
Expect a wait on weekend evenings. The room is small and the reputation is large, and the waiting area is essentially the pavement outside.
Thai Town around it
The neighbourhood runs along Hollywood Boulevard between Normandie and Western with Sunset as a southern parallel, and it is compact enough to walk end to end in twenty minutes. There are night markets, Thai grocery shops, a temple, and a cluster of restaurants that stay open far later than the LA average, several past midnight.
The Metro B Line stops at Hollywood and Western, which puts you a few minutes from the heart of it. Given the parking situation on Sunset in the evening, the train is a better plan than it sounds for a neighbourhood this car-dependent on paper.
Abbot Kinney itself is worth arriving early for. The boulevard runs about a mile from Main Street down toward Venice Boulevard, and the retail mix has shifted from the artist-and-surf-shop era to something considerably more expensive, but the scale of the street is unchanged: low buildings, wide pavements, and a walkable density that is rare on the Westside.
Practical notes
Address: 5233 1/2 West Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, in a strip mall on the south side of Sunset near Harvard. Lunch and dinner, closed at least one day a week; confirm hours before travelling across town. There is a small lot in front and metered street parking nearby that fills at dinner.
Ask for the southern menu by name, start at medium heat rather than hot, order the crispy morning glory salad first and eat it immediately, and get more rice than you think you need. If the wait is long, the surrounding blocks have half a dozen good kitchens within a five-minute walk.
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know whether Jitlada has a table tonight, how hot the southern dishes really run, and which Thai Town kitchen is open latest? Ask Karpo for current hours, a walk-in backup on the same strip, and the route from Hollywood and Western station.
