Address:
383 South Fair Oaks Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91105
Phone Number:
626 793 5200
The sleek Saladang Song (song means “two” in Thai), spun off from neighboring Saladang in 2000, quickly eclipsed the original in both food and design, and sets the standard for Thai food in Los Angeles County, which has literally hundreds of such restaurants. Where Saladang serves fantastic Americanized Thai, Saladang Song offers Thai street food, and it can get pretty wild.
When the waitress said that the only other place you could get miang rambutan was Bangkok, I was sold. Rambutan is a semi-sweet, prickly member of the lychee family. It came in lettuce cups with tofu, peanut, ginger, onion and coconut. My friends’ initial reactions ranged from “Interesting” to “Well, I don’t hate it.” After adjusting to the distinctive flavor and creamy texture, we snatched seconds and thirds.
Other appetizers include deep fried corn cakes: crisp and not oily. For a cool contrast, spoon on some sweet, marinated cucumber slices. A special appetizer, steamed pink dumplings loaded with crumbled roast chicken and peanut, was fabulous. Saladang Song has a way with pink foods, and this is the best of them.
Another great pink dish is mee-ga-ti: sweet rice noodles, soaked in coconut milk, improved by swapping the tofu and bean sprouts for roasted chicken. They also have several rice vermicelli dishes. The thin white noodles arrive in four buns, each topped with a sliver of red pepper.
Song’s best version comes with marinated grilled pork. The sweet, almost caramelized pork, with a delicate vermicelli base and a terrific lime chili sauce, is an all-time great plate of pig.Saladang Song still has some Thai standards on the menu. BBQ chicken is succulent. Flat rice noodles come with hunks of flavorful roast duck, basil and chili, spicy and rich.
Yum eggplant mixes delicious strips of purple Asian eggplant marinated in lime chile sauce with grilled, butterflied shrimp.From the sea, go with poo-nim, deep-fried soft-shell crab with long spears of asparagus, topped with a spicy red wine sauce. Also solid is a special seafood combo of mussels, fish, shrimp, scallops, calamari and crab claws. If the sauce of the day is chili and coconut curry, order the dish.
To drink, skip Thai tea and coffee (although they’re better than most) and order long-an juice, which tastes like Southern sweet tea, with scoops of sweet brown long-an fruit. Ginger “tea,” a blend of fresh ginger root, sugar and hot water, is another winner, spicy and sweet. So is the sweet tea with lime essence (pictured).
For dessert, Saladang Song has mixed success, but they’re certainly original. Go for buttery sticky rice drizzled with condensed milk. If they have it on special, get it with huge slices of juicy mango. The best of three listed toppings is sang-ka-ya, a custard similar to hot butterscotch, only less sweet. Ma-prao, shredded coconut, is fresh out of the shell. Pla-haeng, crushed dried fish, resembles confectioner’s sugar, but lacks sweetness. How fish became a dessert, I have no idea.
Saladang Song also offers the rare, for America, Thai breakfast: boiled rice soup with several toppings, including salted salmon fillet, shrimp, and ground chicken. They even have a breakfast dessert, the suspicious tao-huay, soft tofu in hot ginger syrup. Huh?
Saladang Song is a total Thai package, blending a fun setting with ambitious, delicious food. As a fellow connoisseur of cheap, out of the way ethnic eating said of Saladang Song, “Looks like I have to get used to eating at a popular restaurant. The food’s just too good.”
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