Coldwater Canyon Boulevard is drab and endless as it courses through
North Hollywood, lined with cheap liquor stores, auto body shops and the bland
apartment buildings that local architects call dingbats. But at the upper end
of the street, right where it changes names and plunges into a post-industrial
wasteland of factories and gravel pits, is the majestic, gold-encrusted dome
of Los Angeles’ Wat Thai, the largest Thai Buddhist Temple in the country, grounds
crowded with parishioners, and thronged with small children, many of them in
neat Buddhist-school uniform, clutching coconut ice cream cones, who dart about
as if the temple were a playground. At festival time, the temple comes alive
with the sounds of amplified chanting, the high, acrid scent of incense, and
the monotonous prayers of the saffron-robed monks.

On weekend afternoons, the temple hosts a dozen or so outdoor
kitchens, arrayed around shaded picnic tables in a manner reminiscent of the
great food courts of Southeast Asia, and the air around the temple almost throbs
with the smells of basic Thai cooking: sliced beef grilling over charcoal; the
wheat pancakes called roti sizzling on massive griddles; pungent, briny salt
crabs being pounded in big mortars with fiery-hot green papaya salad. Long lines
form for noodle soups garnished with duck, with stewed pork hocks or with Thai
pickles; for big plates of the intensely herbal grilled-beef salad larp; for
fried fishcakes; for crisp omelets filled with mussels and for vanilla-scented
Thai iced tea. The kids love using the colorful plastic tokens, which you buy
at a central booth and exchange for food as you go, almost as much as they love
the grilled shrimp balls on a stick.

If you’ve attended services at African-American churches, you
may be familiar with the massive spreads of smothered chicken and collard greens
that sometimes follow the sermon. This is the Thai version: delicious, screamingly
spicy, and attended by all Los Angeles.

Wat Thai of Los Angeles, 8225 Coldwater Canyon Blvd., North
Hollywood; for more information, visit www.watthaila.org.