Lers Ros - Civic Center/Tenderloin, San Francisco

Dinner on our last day in San Francisco...

Sometimes people ask me why I open myself up so much on the interwebs when it often subjects you to trolls and stalkers and other kinds of bad juju. But when I had to walk away from just about everything from my old life except my parents and my children about 5 years ago, opening up on the interwebs in a number of ways often saved me from a sense of utter loneliness and disconnectedness.

pad kee mow with chicken

It was an opportunity to start fresh and often find comfort and healing in the kindness and camaraderie of strangers with whom I had no baggage and who had no expectations of me, or a need for me to be any number of things for them that took a toll on my psyche. People who accepted and understood me for the person I had partly chosen and was partly forced to become.

koong chae nam pla
(fresh raw prawns with chili, lemon grass,
a fish sauce/lime based dressing,
fresh mint and sliced raw garlic)

A small handful of those many kind strangers would become trusted friends - something I desperately needed after a long period of wondering if I could trust myself to choose friends anymore.

And one of those friends is my friend Maria, whom I met through chowhound and whom I got to know over a series of chowhound posts that diaried our daily meals and little tidbits of our daily lives. And then through a series of facebook posts that diaried even more of our meals and even bigger tidbits of our lives. And then eventually through almost daily communications of some kind or another where we shared even more of our lives, characters, and personalities, and where I often found myself feeling like a girl who had girlfriends again.

larb ped yang (duck larb)

So you can imagine how super fucking excited I was to finally get to sit down and actually share one of those daily meals with her on her turf. 

And since she knew I'd been craving some really good Thai food for the longest, Maria treated me and Dean to the best meal of our trip at Lers Ros. And we proceeded to have one of the best Thai meals I've ever had over almost five hours of great conversation and laughter and a little bit of Sauvignon Blanc for me, a little bit more of it for them. :)

koh moo yang
(grilled pork shoulder w. chili & rice powder sauce)

Each dish was beautifully seasoned and balanced and felt elevated in its preparation in a really clean, comfortable, casual, and unassuming environment that doesn't look or feel like it's aspiring to anything - which is really rare these days in a sea of restaurants that often look and act like they aspire to some kind of greatness and don't really deliver. And their menu is a wonderfully staggering selection of dishes you don't often get to see on a standard Thai resto menu.

pad kra prow moo krob -
stir fried pork belly with crispy rinds
and fried basil leaves

I can't recommend this place highly enough for really excellent Thai food, regardless of where you think you've had great Thai food before.

shinae

Lers Ros Thai
730 Larkin St.
San Francisco, CA 94109
415.931.6917
www.lersros.com