Coming to the Taste: Kris Yenbamroong

Kris Yenbamroong is the 30-year-old chef of celebrated Night + Market, a West Hollywood hideaway on the Sunset Strip where he’s serving regional Thai street food to ecstatic fans. The restaurant, adjacent to his family’s more traditional Thai restaurant Talesai, is on L.A. Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold’s 99 essential restaurants list.

Yenbamroong earned a film degree from New York University before joining the family business and had no formal culinary training. But he opened Night + Market in 2010 to cook the street food he discovered in trips to Thailand: fried chicken with mortar-pounded sauces, tangy house-made sausages, spicy catfish wrapped in banana leaf.

The young chef was a semifinalist for a James Beard Foundation award in the Rising Star Chef category. And he recently was named one of the best chefs of the year by Los Angeles magazine.

Yenbamroong will lead a cooking demonstration during the Flavors of L.A. portion of the Taste on Saturday, Sept. 2. Tickets are $65 and are available, along with more information, at the Taste website.