Nok’s Kitchen

Orange County’s Laotian food scene has only continued to improve over the last five years, thanks to new places like Kra Z Kai’s, still-strong restaurants including Vientiane, and smaller Lao vendors at local festivals. One of the best recent additions was the opening of Nok’s Kitchen in Westminster, which began as a small restaurant with an even smaller menu, and super friendly service.

At Nok’s, expect excellent Lao sausages, salmon larb salad, and dragonfruit lemonades, generous DIY khao pun sin (the Lao version of Vietnamese bun bo hue) soup, and some of the best mango sticky rice you’ll taste locally, served here with pandan. Despite the obvious quality of these items, and attractive plating with fresh orchids, the pricing is generally very reasonable. That said, we were a little less enthusiastic about the ribeye skewers and papaya salad, which were both fine but unremarkable, and disappointed by a chicken thigh skewer that was huge but too dry inside.