With barbecue brisket drunken noodles, Jo’s Modern Thai defies stereotypes

At first glance, Jo’s Modern Thai can be easy to stereotype as a dime-adozen Asian fusion restaurant. Maybe it’s the burger with lemongrass and makrut lime mayo that throws off seekers of “true” Thai cuisine, or perhaps the neon-accented decor that leans into boba shop vibes. I hear dismissals of restaurants like Jo’s all the time from food lovers who seek “authenticity” — a “real” culinary experience untouched by the world around it. They might take one quick look and walk away. But that would be a mistake. What’s really interesting about Jo’s is how it carries the tension that exists between adaptation and tradition: Opened by a second-generation Thai restaurant owner with a fun, Californian-Thai menu, it strives to create an inclusive, truly Oakland-style take on Thai American cuisine.

The restaurant’s drunken noodle dish ($19) is a good place to start. The kitchen sears a springy tangle of wheat noodles in a wok with some usual suspects of American Thai restaurants like oyster sauce, onion and bell pepper. The noodles, though, are instant ramen, from the popular Southeast Asian brand Mama. And chunks of smoked brisket act as the protein, a Texas-style barbecue addition from Temescal’s Smokin’ Woods BBQ. The fatty meat and wok hei work well together to enunciate the charred flavor in each bite offset by pungent Thai basil and young green peppercorns.

It’s a rendition of drunken noodles very much like food you might make from stuff in your fridge while actually inebriated, if you had some barbecue leftovers on hand and the expert wok-tossing skills of the cooks at Jo’s.

The chef at Jo’s, Isaan native Intuon Kornnawong, explained her tweaks: While instant ramen is an anomaly for drunken noodles in the U.S., she says that many of her favorite street food stalls in Thailand use Mama noodles for the dish. The brisket, meanwhile, is a custom recipe. She worked with Smokin’ Woods to make sure the fully cooked meat stayed tender after a trip through the wok station.

There’s an obvious connection between this dish and the pastrami pad kee mao served at the Southern California Night + Market Sahm, which Kornnawong helped open in 2018. A tribute to a historic Los Angeles deli, the noodle dish is like a hand outstretched toward the community, a demonstration of cultural give-and-take. Though the style is different, Kornnawong’s brisket noodles function the same way: Here’s something you like plus something I like. It’s an idea that makes the menu, and the restaurant as a whole,

Kai Garcia makes drinks at the Oakland restaurant.

Meal for two, without drinks: $50-$70

What to order: Shrimp mousse toast ($15), squid salad, drunken noodles, green chile salsa, Thai michelada

Meat-free options: A few dedicated vegetarian dishes, with several entrees able to be modified.

Drinks: Full bar

Transportation: On the 14-14th St - San Antonio - High St.; 54-35th Ave. - Merritt College; and 57-40th St. - MacArthur AC Transit lines. Street parking.

Best practices: Reservations recommended, though walking in earlier during dinner hours is easy.

feel like a gesture of generosity.

Remixing Thai cuisine was always the intention. The restaurant’s owner, Kao Saelee, grew up here and worked at his family’s no-frills Berkeley Thai restaurant Racha Cafe, popular with university students looking for affordable pad thai and curries. For years, he dreamed of opening a place like Jo’s, where people of all backgrounds, including the diverse residents of the Laurel, could feel welcome.

“I wanted to create something that fits what my generation of Asian Americans wants,” he said.

The name itself is a tribute to Saelee’s wife, Jo, who knew very little about Thai food and culture before the two began dating. Dishes like the brisket drunken noodles, which bridge cuisines, are for her — and for anyone else who has yet to dive headfirst into Thai food.

Another entryway for newcomers might be the burger ($15), American in appearance with Isaan flavors throughout. It’s really a fried pork patty — laab moo tod — scented with lemongrass, garlic, fish sauce and makrut lime mayonnaise. The dense flavors haunt the palate long after the burger is gone, with its brioche bun

turning the volume down just so.

There’s also a spin on a michelada, part of an inventive cocktail list from former Starline Social Club bar manager Tayler Sampson. Called the Final Lamiat ($11), the beverage replaces the traditional Clamato and hot sauce with an intense dose of nam jim, the spicy Thai sauce with heavy notes of lime, chile peppers and cilantro. It pairs well with just about everything on the menu.

The space, like the menu, is a major departure from the ambience at Racha. While Racha’s ample seating and streamlined service style are wonderfully suited for the numerous student banquets it hosts, Jo’s is more intimate. The dining room has the vibe of a beachside cafe, with neon signage (including a neon monkey), tropical plant motifs and glossy white tables. Though the restaurant is in a working-class stretch of the Laurel district, it could easily be in Los Angeles’ hip Silver Lake neighborhood.

Saelee and Kornnawong certainly aren’t the only ones in the country to play with Thai fare in this way. Several new-wave restaurants have made names for themselves, for instance, on excellent burgers. At Eem in Portland,

Ore., a smashburger with American cheese pairs with tempura-fried vegetables and a dipping sauce of Thai chile paste. At Los Angeles’ Jitlada, the off-menu Jazz Burger comes with Thai basil, slivered red onion, tomato and an iceberg lettuce leaf for wrapping. New York’s Thai Diner does a classic American burger alongside ThaiUkrainian stuffed cabbage tom kha.

But Jo’s still feels like it couldn’t be anywhere but Oakland. This is seen in dishes such as the squid salad ($17). Far and away the best item on the menu, it has the telltale creaminess of Monterey squids, which wilt as you chew them. The Californian cephalopods are then dressed with licorice-like laksa leaves, mint, an extra-piquant red chile powder and nutty toasted rice powder; eat the salad piled onto puffy, crinkly sesame crackers. The dish brought me back to the first time I had Thai-style Monterey squid, at Kin Khao in San Francisco, where Kornnawong worked until the pandemic began; it felt like the chef was nodding to what she had learned in the places she’d worked.

As Jo’s and its peer restaurants — Kin Khao, Eem and the rest — demonstrate, there’s no sense in judging restaurants based on some Manichaean idea of authentic versus affected. Examine why one place seems more “true” than the other and you’ll find that there’s so much slippage within these descriptors, which tend to be based on stereotypes themselves. I’ve seen feedback about Jo’s being a “gentrified” restaurant for “white people” that falls into this false binary. Do all Thai restaurants need to serve food at a lower-thanaverage price point to be “real”?

When writer Sara Kay analyzed tens of thousands of Yelp reviews in a 2019 Eater NY story, she found that writeups that included cudgel-like evaluations of authenticity at nonEuropean restaurants bolstered their claims with observations of “dirt floors, plastic stools, and other patrons who are non-white.” While Kay was focusing on New York City, Bay Area businesses aren’t exempt from this dynamic. Since I don’t value my own mental health, I’ve read plenty of criticisms of places like Oakland’s La Santa Torta and Korean grocer Queens that slammed their perceived inauthenticity, equating a small amount of rice in kimbap with the selling of one’s soul. Those sorts of critiques are shortsighted and, frankly, ignorant. Cuisines are allowed to change — to become something that might challenge people who think they know them inside and out. That’s the exciting part about restaurants like Jo’s, where a burger that vibrates with citrus and fish sauce is one of the most Thai things on the menu.