Night + Market - Wine & Spirits Magazine

Night + Market


photo by Sirin Lynn Sanglimsuwan

Pork toro with jaew Night + Market now has three LA locations: WeHo, in West Hollywood, Song, in Silver Lake, and Sahm, in Venice Beach. Each is a loud, riotously colorful evocation of dining in a Thai neighborhood joint. Kris Yenbamroong’s menu is devoted to northern Thai dishes, like pork toro with jaew, a northern Thai chile dip, or drunken noodles strewn with ribbons of pastrami from Langer’s (a local institution). Sarah Yenbamroong manages a small but lively selection of natural-leaning wines, such as Louis-Antoine Luyt’s Chilean blend, Cuvée Benoît. She also goes big on magnums, with at least a dozen available at each restaurant.

Karen started her career in wine as an enologist at Araujo in Napa Valley, having graduated with a BA in International Relations and French from UC Davis. She went on to handle education and sales support for Indie Wineries in California before joining the sommelier team at Spago for a year. For the past several years, she has been working with the publishing group behind the Somm Journal, part of the launch team for The Clever Root, where she served as Managing Editor for two years, then going freelance as a Senior Editor, to raise her daughter, who is now two years old. She also contributes to the Josephine Porter Institute’s newsletter on Applied Biodynamics. Karen has studied in Bordeaux and worked in the Rhône, led there by a glass of Domaine du Pegau, which sparked her interest in the Rhône. And it was a bottle of Diamond Creek’s Gravelly Meadow from the early 1990s that had shifted her view of Napa Valley—her family has been in the Valley for five generations, and once had a dairy farm on the land that became Lake Berryessa.


This story appears in the print issue of April 2019.
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