With the world’s largest Thai community outside of Thailand, Los Angeles has a thriving Thai food scene to match, counting among its esteemed restaurant proprietors the likes of Sarintip “Jazz” Singsanong of Jitlada and Kris Yenbamroong of Night + Market.
Yet there is something undeniably special about Cholada Thai, a casual, wood-paneled beachside spot reported to have been destroyed by the Pacific Palisades wildfire that spread into Malibu on Tuesday. Cholada is—was—the kind of spot you could show up to with a sweatshirt thrown over your bathing suit, hair tied back in a salt-crusted ponytail as you chatted with the mostly female staff doing vegetable prep in the kitchen over tom yum soup and Thai iced tea. It was the ultimate in beachy, unpretentious LA fare, and for the last 10 years, it functioned as a kind of home away from home for me.
I first washed up at Cholada in 2016 as a miserable college grad new to LA and unsure how to make friends or fill my days in a city that felt so giant and unyielding compared to my beloved, densely populated New York. Absent a full-time job, a few days a week, I would leave my shabby apartment complex before sunrise and arrive in Malibu just as the sky burst into color, sitting on the shore with a coffee and watching the sea shift for hours. It was a habit that sounds romantic now but at the time only served to underscore my loneliness.
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My first meal at Cholada was simple—pad thai with shrimp and a Thai iced tea, if the blurry photo I posted to Instagram at the time can be trusted—but the restaurant’s homey atmosphere made me feel less like a randomly drifting visitor and more like a real Angeleno, someone with an actual routine (even if said routine merely consisted of a morning at the beach and a Thai lunch special).
I stuck to that beach-and-Cholada program for much of the last decade, parking my car along the PCH and delighting in the fact that no matter how much my life changed—even as I moved in and out and back to Los Angeles—Cholada seemed to stay the same. That is, until Tuesday, when video surfaced of the restaurant burning in the fires.
Obviously, the loss of a favorite restaurant is nothing at all compared to what Cholada’s owners, workers, and neighbors in Malibu are going through as they evacuate or prepare to leave their homes and many of their belongings behind. The most precious things I have in LA, my partner and dog, are (for the moment) out of the path of the fire; I am trying to remind myself simply to be grateful for that as I reach out to friends, from Santa Monica to Altadena and beyond, who are attempting to take shelter from the fires. Still, I can’t pretend I wasn’t shocked to see Cholada—a restaurant that first opened in 2000—burn to the ground.
The feeling of powerlessness that hits when you watch a place you’ve spent countless hours in be destroyed is hard to quantify, and it’s harder still to to know what to do in response. It is too soon to think about rebuilding, but I’m hoping to help the restaurant’s staff and any other businesses in my adopted LA community when they need it. Cholada Thai was there for me for years when I needed a place to go and sit and watch the ocean and read my book and feel, however infinitesimally, like a part of something. There was a kind of safety in the home I found there, and that is what all wish for them now.
