Why Do My Noodles Look Like Pasta?
Wat Dong Moon Lek is a medium sized Thai restaurant in East Hollywood that shares a small strip mall with an Indian restaurant along with some other small businesses. The turquoise interior walls are adorned with canvas paintings of rock & roll artists and various celebrities from floor to ceiling. It’s got a cool artsy vibe to it that could totally pass for being a hip little restaurant in Bangkok.
The service is great here and the servers are very friendly and helpful which is really nice as a first timer because their menu is HUGE. It’s filled from top to bottom on both sides on a tabloid sized paper. They’ve got a bunch of rice dishes, noodles, noodle soup, appetizers, curries, lunch specials, you name it. They also have a pretty extensive drink menu though we didn’t really take advantage of it.
To start, we ordered the Isaan wings which are Northeastern Thai style chicken wings that are served with a roasted chili oil dipping sauce. This was one of our favorite dishes of the night for sure. The wings were nice and crispy and were very flavorful even without the dipping sauce. It kind of tasted like they were fried with salt, pepper and fish sauce, though I’m not sure what the ingredients actually were. With the sauce, they were extra delicious. The sauce had a nice kick to it and added a whole new layer of flavor to already flavorful wings. Definitely a must try here.
We ordered the Pork Spare Rib Shanghai Noodle Spicy Soup. The broth was so tasty but the noodles were very unexpected. The soup was sour, very spicy (I ordered a 5 from a spiciness scale of 1-10 and definitely regretted this decision) and very flavorful. It kind of reminded me a little bit of tom yum broth because of its tanginess but wasn’t as lemongrass-y. The spare rib was a lot less tender than I expected and pretty chewy. The noodles were... interesting. They weren’t the typical noodles you’d expect in a noodle soup dish. They resembled more of like a rice noodle pasta similar to the shape of ziti. I think I would have liked the dish more with regular glass or rice noodles.
We also had the Wat Dong Moon Lek Beef Noodles with entrails and their Hainan chicken. This is a noodle soup with a darker broth that can be described as a hybrid of Taiwanese beef noodle soup and pho. Though the broth and noodles were tasty, it was nothing superb or mind blowing and the taste was very familiar. The Hainan chicken was served with a side of rice, broth and that delectable Hainanese chicken sauce. This was a delicious dish that was done well here. The broth was on point, sauce was flavorful, but our only crit was that the chicken was a little bit on the drier side.
Wat Dong Moon Lek
4356 Fountain Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90029
