Chef Kanlaya Palivan and her team have transformed the space on San Pablo Avenue that formerly belonged to Paisan. They’ve added bright orange dining room chairs. Yellow, pink, red and blue lanterns hang down from the ceiling. And a botanical wall blooms with artificial flowers and butterflies. The greenery even forms an informal wreath around a sign exclaiming the Lao greeting, “Sabaidee.”
Leading up to this January’s opening, Lao Garden notified its social media followers that opening day would be postponed. While Palivan waited for the City of Berkeley to approve the restaurant’s permits, she briefly set up a kitchen in Oakland as Rose Garden Uptown. A couple of months later, when Berkeley approved the permits, she sold Rose Garden to new owners.
At Lao Garden, Palivan boldly plates nam khao ($22) with a giant fan of fresh romaine leaves. This crispy rice dish is served as a salad that diners can then ladle into a lettuce leaf to make a wrap. “Croutons” or crumbly balls of rice are jumbled together with heaps of fresh herbs, peanuts, fermented pork sausage, fish sauce and lime juice. It’s an interactive plate of food mixing several potent sour flavors.
While the bright-pink morsels of fermented pork gave me a reason to pause—rawish or uncooked proteins have never agreed with me—they’re only one item on a long list of well-blended ingredients. Vegetarians can opt for a small appetizer plate of crispy rice ($12) that could work as a substitute. Palivan told me that her version of nam khao differs from other restaurants.
“It’s not soggy like other places that offer the same dish,” she said. “It’s a secret we’re not sharing.”
Lao Garden’s menu is vast. Almost every item or heading has a brief, cheerful description. On nam khao Palivan writes, “Golden crispy rice balls boast a crunchy exterior that gives way to a soft, flavorful interior.” The front of the menu includes: small plates; fried rice; grilled/steamed/roasted; soup; yum salads and seafood; thum, a traditional Lao smashed salad; and laab, a meat and herb salad made with padaek, a fermented fish sauce.
The back of the menu continues on with six more sections, including noodles “served on a bed of cabbage, carrots, bean sprouts, green onions and mint.” Drunken noodles ($18) have a nice, spicy tang to them. Kua mee Lao ($15) is the Lao equivalent of pad Thai but Palivan serves it with “fluffy scrambled eggs and the natural sweetness of tender bean sprouts.”
The kitchen can manage the menu because many of the dishes share the same foundation. “Let’s say for the laab, you have different proteins—beef, pork, duck or even shrimp—but the base is pretty much the same,” Palivan said, adding that she’s eaten at Thai/Lao restaurants that don’t serve authentic Laotian dishes. “Our own Laotian people who have dined with us, they say things like, ‘Wow, this is really like home cooking.’”
Laab, according to Palivan, originated from Laos. “If you go to a Thai Isan restaurant, it’s on the sweet side,” she said. Whereas the Laotian version includes a toasted rice that’s ground and then sprinkled on the dish. “You can taste a little crunchiness in it. And, of course, there’s lime juice on there,” she said. The addition of padaek—a secret ingredient that she is willing to share—also sets it apart from the Thai version.
The chef uses the word “funky” to describe the flavor of padaek. When the sauce is on an order of thum lao lao ($18), or green papaya salad, “You either really like it or you don’t,” Palivan said. If you cook it right, padaek has a fishy smell. “We cook ours to a point where the smell is not overwhelming. The taste is just wonderful. The aroma is there,” she said. “It’s a certain way of preparing it.”
The fermented fish sauce didn’t overwhelm my plate of laab gai ($18). It paired nicely with nam khao, lightened up by lime and cilantro. Elsewhere, I’d eaten a green papaya dish that was smothered in an unpleasant version of a padaek sauce. The “certain way of preparing it” makes all the difference.
Lao Garden, 2514 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley. Open Mon-Sat 11am to 3pm and 5–9pm, Sun noon to 3pm and 5–9pm. 510.705.1958. laogarden.net
