You do win friends with (robust, Thai-style) salad

Detailed summary

Lesser-seen northern Thai dishes. Bold spicing. A karaoke room: just three ways that this cheery shopping centre eatery is winning over its neighbours.

It’s hard to be a salad these days. Doubly so if you’re a salad trying to catch people’s attention at a cafe, pub or restaurant.

Who wants low in fat and high in fibre when you can have the crunch of fried chicken or the elastic, Instagrammable pull of melted cheese? And so, good ol’ salad gets ignored and left on the fridge shelf, all dressed up with nowhere to go.

However, if you take yourself to Louder Louder at Hawaiian’s Park Centre in Victoria Park, you’ll quickly understand that getting a salad for lunch (or dinner) doesn’t have to mean going without.

First things first: salads in Thailand aren’t salads in the Australian sense of the term, but an approximation of the Thai word yum which means “mixing things together”. So while Thai-style “salads” features vegetables, they’re often deployed in service of meat or other proteins.

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Consider the crisp wedges of white cabbage tucked into the minced duck salad known as larb. You use them to scoop up portions of the limey, stir-fried duck throbbing with the heat of ground chilli and smoky crunch of ground toasted rice.

Order the miang kor moo yang and you’ll get platter starring slices of fatty pork neck grilled over charcoal; leafy all-sorts including sheaths of cos and frilly blooms of green oak lettuce; plus dipping sauces. The betel leaves synonymous with Thai miang might be conspicuously absent but the platter still has everything you need to build bundles of meat and vegetable joy that are hard to stop eating.

There’s also, naturally, som tum: Thailand’s famous pace-quickening jumble of long beans, bird’s eye chillis, cherry tomatoes and thick hunks of unripe papaya that is by turns zippy, crunchy and fiery. (Did you know that throughout Asia, unripe or “green” fruits are often thought of and cooked as vegetables?).

If anyone’s wondering why I’ve written the word “chilli” so much, it’s because heat is integral to Louder Louder’s identity, just as…

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