The menus at many Thai restaurants in America can be overwhelmingly long. They leave too much choice in the hands of diners who will lean on the familiar, or who insist on only eating white-meat chicken even though the dish in its native country might typically be served exclusively with bone-in drumettes or perhaps not chicken at all.
At 5-year-old Nana Thai, owners Achiraya Sripanya, who goes by Ashely, and Sukrit Sitthichaisawad, affectionately known as B, approach their food with the reverence they would offer their own families and themselves. Recipes and the business name honor B’s grandmother, but the word “nana” also references a neighborhood in Bangkok with a complicated reputation and, more generally, the notion of a meeting place for all walks of life and the virtue of variety — of choice.
But you don’t get to choose when and how to order your khao soi at the couple’s new brick-and-mortar restaurant in Tacoma’s Lincoln District. You can only dig into a bowl of the unctous, golden liquid — cooked by Sitthichaisawad and served by Sripanya— on site, at a table in the petite dining room on 38th Street. A key ingredient is thua nao, a dried disc of fermented soybeans imported from Thailand, cooked with chicken broth, coconut milk, spices and curry paste. No white meat here, said Sripanya, and no beef or pork or tofu. Two glossy chicken drums swim on the surface with a modest pile of crunchy egg noodles, hiding a swirl of thin, round noodles (not flat). I want three more servings of the punchy pak gat dong (pickled mustard greens), one of several finishing flourishes that immediately made Nana stand apart from many of its local peers.
Sitthichaisawad and Sripanya learned that khao soi didn’t travel well after fielding a few too many customer complaints about the texture of the noodles during their five years at Freighthouse Square. They even tried separating the noodles from the broth, as many pho restaurants do to save the vermicelli from the beef broth before it’s time to slurp, but then people wondered how to assemble it at home. Offering takeout felt necessary at that (sorry to say) rundown food court, where grab-and-go is common, and people aren’t particularly keen on lingering. They had taken over another Thai restaurant there, and some days, they said, it was painfully slow. Once the writing was on the wall of the all-but-inevitable demolition of the historic but dilapidated structure, to be usurped by a light rail station, Sitthichaisawad was on the brink of giving up…