What adopted was a whole renovation that uncovered household relics and reimagined the house that helped elevate Pichetrungsi, and catapulted the chef and his Sherman Oaks restaurant to worldwide fame.
“In order to preserve something,” he posted, “you have to change it.”
The neighborhood Thai restaurant, based 44 years in the past by husband-and-wife workforce Ricky and Rattikorn Pichetrungsi, served the Sherman Oaks group for many years. However when their son, Justin, took over the restaurant a number of years in the past, his personal imaginative and prescient started to take maintain: new dishes, new codecs for having fun with them, an expanded wine program and a brand new power. Its generational mix of outdated and new helped it garner accolades together with being named the L.A. Occasions Restaurant of the 12 months in 2022. That very same yr, Justin Pichetrungsi obtained the title of greatest chef in California from the James Beard Basis.
If all goes as deliberate and Anajak reopens on Friday it can function completely new gear — besides, that’s, for his father’s authentic three-hole wok station, which has been refurbished. His mom, nonetheless a fixture within the restaurant, will lastly have her personal workstation devoted to her well-known mango sticky rice. Friends will discover a further eating room, a completely new and extra open kitchen, an overhaul of the unique eating house, his grandfather’s artwork, a repaving of the alfresco space (the venue for its standard Thai Taco Tuesdays) and extra.
Anajak chef-owner Justin Pichetrungsi within the restaurant’s alleyway for Thai Taco Tuesday in 2021.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Occasions)
It began with the dish pit. Anajak ran via a whole lot of plates, flatware and wine glasses by internet hosting 250 friends an evening. Washing them multi function three-compartment sink situated alongside the prepare dinner line, wok station and grill lastly proved untenable.
Pichetrungsi first requested the place he may have the ability to transfer the sink, and all of it unraveled from there: He’d have to put it the place the bogs had been. To supply friends new bogs, he must renovate and open the adjoining wine storage room. And if a wall must come down with a purpose to renovate, he may as nicely redo all of it.
“The hardest part of the business is the organization part of it, not the innovation,” he advised The Occasions. “Innovation is so fun: You dream of new dishes, new ways to talk to your customers and things like that. But with all the behind-the-scenes stuff, people never saw how broken it was in order to make the show go on.”
In January the employees started in small phases, akin to transferring the contents of the wine storage room to the workplace and cupboard space within the alley. Then on July 1, building started in earnest.
Diners within the Anajak Thai Delicacies alleyway, pre-renovations, left, with a view of the restaurant’s important eating room throughout building in July.
(Mariah Tauger and Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Occasions)
On the primary day, the employees handed a sledgehammer between themselves, every taking a swing at a wall, together with Ricky Pichetrungsi, who attacked it from his wheelchair.
“Everyone on the team has a hand in breaking that wall down, which was a beautiful moment,” Justin Pichetrungsi stated.
As they renovated, they uncovered Anajak relics: a field of outdated movie star pictures and headshots of those that’ve visited via the years, the unique, grease-coated money register, outdated menus, branded matchbooks and a whole mirror his father constructed partitions round throughout his personal renovations 30 years in the past.
“I was hoping to find money, but unfortunately… ,” Pichetrungsi laughed.
Pichetrungsi, a skilled artist who previously labored at Disney Imagineering, wished to make modifications for a very long time — longer than he’d recognized he wished to turn into a chef or take over the household restaurant.
Anajak Thai Delicacies chef-owner Justin Pichetrungsi shares pages of his sketchbook detailing the restaurant’s 2025 renovation.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Occasions)
Whereas revisiting his sketchbooks from years prior, Pichetrungsi discovered an inventory. He was flipping via a e book he hadn’t utilized in a decade and noticed varied notes of modifications he would make to Anajak.
“I realized that a lot of my decision making in the last couple of years has really been about how to get to this specific point,” he stated. “A point where I can have a kitchen that I was happy to work in — not that I wasn’t happy to work in my father’s kitchen, but it was very uncomfortable — and it wasn’t about my uncomfortability. It is and it was about developing a space that would feel in line with who we wanted to be.”
Anajak Thai Delicacies house owners Ricky, Rattikorn and Justin Pichetrungsi on the Los Angeles Occasions 101 Checklist occasion on Dec. 3, 2024.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Occasions)
Pichetrungsi was nonetheless drawing and instructing when he started serving to his mother and father preserve their restaurant afloat after the 2008 financial disaster. However in 2019, after his father suffered a stroke, he left Disney and took over Anajak full-time, working alongside his mom, his aunt and infrequently his father. In a bid to as soon as once more preserve the household enterprise alive, he pivoted through the pandemic, flipping the vacant alley house to host Thai Taco Tuesdays, a wildly standard weekly occasion with strains across the block. Then, he pushed its boundaries even additional with a continually evolving Thai tasting menu.
When Pichetrungsi started cooking on the restaurant there have been eight employees members, together with himself and his relations. Now there are practically 60.
Close to the middle of the restaurant, Ricky Pichetrungsi’s former workplace — which as soon as served as a de facto daycare heart however turned storage for pots and pans — might be dwelling to a brand new climate-controlled wine cellar overseen by wine director Ian Krupp.
The development workforce works six days every week, starting at 5 a.m., with a number of crews overlapping. They’ve put in a brand new oven hood, a floating kitchen go, new plumbing, new electrical methods and new banquettes within the eating room.
The brand new eating room, which the employees calls the East Wing, will supply two dozen seats and a hallway to the brand new bogs. Oil work and watercolors by Pichetrungsi’s late grandfather had been flown in from Thailand. The outdated, now-gone carpet, in addition to a tarnished “butt print” part of the wall the place for years friends and employees leaned whereas ready for the restrooms, are additionally being framed.
“It’s gross, but it’s art made by millions of people,” Pichetrungsi stated.
He alerted the restaurant’s employees all through the final yr, giving time to make plans or discover non permanent employment for the month and a half of closed enterprise. Many took trip. Some staged at different eating places. Some are working via building, writing the restaurant’s first official coaching manuals.
Pichetrungsi declined to share the price of Anajak’s overhaul however stated, “It’ll be a lot of pad Thais.”
Exterior of Anajak Thai Delicacies in 2023. The brand new iteration of the restaurant options hand-painted window signage.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Occasions)
Pichetrungsi’s mother and father raised considerations in regards to the renovations: Consider the price. Did all of it actually must be carried out? However they’ve come to understand the modifications.
“They’re not as nostalgic about it as I am,” Justin Pichetrungsi stated. “They’ve seen it so much, they’re okay letting it go. But I wasn’t able to. I was here during the demo day, and it was a hard time for me.”
As totally different because the restaurant will look, a lot of it can stay the identical. The Kobe basketball jersey will nonetheless be hanging over the eating room. Thai Taco Tuesday is about to renew instantly, and the restaurant’s omakase will return as nicely, albeit at a later date.
With a lot extra kitchen house, new dishes may crop up at Anajak, too.
At present, Pichetrungsi’s notebooks are crammed with sketches of flooring plans, the views from varied tables, the brand new server station and dishes he may wish to execute within the new kitchen: The addition of a second deep fryer might someday imply entire fried fish. There could possibly be sufficient house on the go to shuck oysters and construct seafood towers. Or perhaps, he joked, these are the modifications friends will see in one other decade, when he decides to shake issues up over again.
