Kra-Pow Thai Eatery

After one year in Chino, Kra-Pow Thai Eatery opened two new locations and closed the original, becoming the first and only Thai restaurant in Stanton’s Rodeo 39 (replacing Kra-Z-Kai’s Laotian Barbeque) and Whittier’s Rodeo 72 Public Market food halls. The surprising result is a menu that’s atypically large by Rodeo standards, with six appetizers ($7-21), tom yum and tom kha soups ($13-14), three grilled meats ($10-21), nine rice and/or curry dishes (generally $16-21), five noodle dishes ($16-21), and if seasonally available, one dessert: mango sticky rice. That’s nearly a full Thai menu – and doubly impressive given the “small but mighty” menu philosophy adopted by Kra-Z-Kai’s and most other Rodeo vendors.

Better yet, all the dishes we tried across two abbreviated visits were really very good. On visit one, we ordered the Pad Kee Mao (“drunken noodles”) at Kra-Pow’s maximum spice level of 5 with skirt steak ($21) as the protein, and were equally impressed by the spice, the tenderness of the steak, and the perfect chew of the flat rice noodles. We tried the sweet soy variant Pad See Eew with Thai BBQ pork ($18) on our second visit – zero spice – and fell completely in love with its wok hei smoked noodles and equally delicious bites of meat. While Kra-Pow’s top heat level won’t sate Thai spice fanatics, the flavors and textures here were otherwise spot-on authentic.