We stood outside the strip mall in a circle, not talking, only chewing.
“Is that … corn?” my sister asked, looking down at an aluminum cup filled with what we could identify only as some sort of coconut pudding.
“I think mine has …” My dad took another bite into his own pudding, white coconut liquid topping oozing out of the aluminum liner, revealing a bright green gelatinous layer filled with crunchy chunks. “Nuts,” he muttered with a full mouth. “Or something.”
“I think each cup has a different type of … nugget?” I said.
My mom groaned.
“These all taste so gummacious!”
We didn’t argue with her. Instead, we stared into the large grocery bag filled with $20 worth of treats we purchased from Bhan Kanom Thai, a candy shop on Hollywood Boulevard in Thai Town.
Thai Town is a lively strip of restaurants, video shops and record stores with fluorescent store signs all written in Thai. Families bustle in and out of buffet restaurants, filled with steaming hot plates of noodles and rice.
The primary thing to understand about my family is we yearn for culinary novelty. We develop a collective Cohn family machismo about eating out together; if you’re not trying the wackiest-looking item in the store, you’re missing out.
Hence, despite the fact that the jiggling coconut concoctions were a bust, we were not ready to give up the fight to enjoy Thai dessert. Maybe we just didn’t buy the right things or maybe we just hadn’t ripped through the good stuff yet.
We felt like part of a drug deal, opening package after package of chewy, colorful candy, taking one bite of something and passing it off to the next family member in search of a satisfying sugar high.
Bhan Kanom Thai is really any foodie’s paradise. The smell of frying dough greets you as workers flip thin, crisp crepes on a griddle for kanom beung, a crunchy wafer-like cookie filled with cream and shredded sweet egg.
Center displays are stacked with baked goods, like buns filled with taro and red bean, and puffy, pastel-colored sweets that are the texture of angel food cake and taste a lot like perfume. All along the walls of Bhan Kanom Thai are boxes of prepackaged candies and cookies, from Pocky to Yan Yan, as well as fruit snacks and crunchy coconut milk candy. My sister and I admired an especially cute box of “bean cakes” shaped like smiling cats and dogs.
A refrigerator in the back of the store houses custards, puddings and milk drinks, but perhaps most promising of all was the ice cream. With flavors like lychee, red bean and green tea, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the chilly treats would be icy or creamy.
Yet on a cold Hollywood night, what appealed to me more than ice cream were the bundles of sticky rice, filled either with banana or taro, steaming in a banana leaf.
Biting into the warm, chewy rice treat was satisfyingly filling, and the banana and taro were both not overly sweet. But it was a similarly gummy experience as chewing on the coconut creams and green-colored sticky rice balls.
Had it been a warmer night, I would also have gravitated toward the thick, creamy milk drinks that could be filled with everything from red bean and tapioca balls to pineapple-flavored beans, sticky rice, corn and a gooey taro liquid.
Heating racks inside Bhan Kanom Thai boasted offerings of fried banana, fried potato and popular taro cakes known as pang chi that I one day hope to go back and try.
Coconut milk seemed a predominant flavor in all of the treats we tried, and while nothing stood out as especially extraordinary, the experience of marveling at all of the different colors, shapes, textures and smells made for a culinary experience that, while defined by “gummaciousness,” still seemed irresistible.
If you too dare to try the wackiest-looking item on a menu, e-mail Cohn at jcohn@media.ucla.edu.