You do win friends with (robust, Thai-style) salad

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It’s hard to be a salad these days. Doubly so if you’re a salad trying to catch people’s attention at a cafe, pub or restaurant.

Who wants low in fat and high in fibre when you can have the crunch of fried chicken or the elastic, Instagrammable pull of melted cheese? And so, good ol’ salad gets ignored and left on the fridge shelf, all dressed up with nowhere to go.

However, if you take yourself to Louder Louder at Hawaiian’s Park Centre in Victoria Park, you’ll quickly understand that getting a salad for lunch (or dinner) doesn’t have to mean going without.

First things first: salads in Thailand aren’t salads in the Australian sense of the term, but an approximation of the Thai word yum which means “mixing things together”. So while Thai-style “salads” features vegetables, they’re often deployed in service of meat or other proteins.

Consider the crisp wedges of white cabbage tucked into the minced duck salad known as larb. You use them to scoop up portions of the limey, stir-fried duck throbbing with the heat of ground chilli and smoky crunch of ground toasted rice.

Order the miang kor moo yang and you’ll get platter starring slices of fatty pork neck grilled over charcoal; leafy all-sorts including sheaths of cos and frilly blooms of green oak lettuce; plus dipping sauces. The betel leaves synonymous with Thai miang might be conspicuously absent but the platter still has everything you need to build bundles of meat and vegetable joy that are hard to stop eating.

There’s also, naturally, som tum: Thailand’s famous pace-quickening jumble of long beans, bird’s eye chillis, cherry tomatoes and thick hunks of unripe papaya that is by turns zippy, crunchy and fiery. (Did you know that throughout Asia, unripe or “green” fruits are often thought of and cooked as vegetables?).

If anyone’s wondering why I’ve written the word “chilli” so much, it’s because heat is integral to Louder Louder’s identity, just as it is in Thailand’s Issan region that informs much of the restaurant’s menu. A four-chilli heat scale helps guests pick appropriate spice levels, starting with the gentle buzz of the shrimp fried rice.

Most “hot” dishes come with a two-chilli rating. The som tum, for instance, smoulders in a way that creates huff and puff but stops short of blowing houses down. The phed-mak kaprao – beef mince stir-fried with basil and four different chillis – is the sole three-chilli item and is, unsurprisingly, very spicy. It is also very delicious and a must-order.

Guests are free to order things that aren’t “salads” too. While prawn cakes and chicken wings tick the boxes for crowd-pleasing starters, I’m all about the grilled house-fermented pork sausages: four chubby links of tangy, squishy deliciousness worshipped as sai krok. Louder Louder’s soup game is very, very strong, starting with cleverly pitching them as hotpots. Built for two, each hotpot is sour and spicy as required, from the thrust of the clear, seafood-dense poh tak (“shipwreck”) number to the intensity of the pork soft bone soup stained orange by dynamite-like sticks of dried chilli.

While Louder Louder excels at the bold flavours of Thailand’s north, some of its other dishes don’t move me as much. The hefty beef rib and the rich, coconutty sauce in the massaman curry are cooked separately so the latter lacks the vital savour that comes with cooking meat on the bone. (It’s tasty, but just not massaman).

The red glow of the grilled boneless chicken calls to mind char siew rather than anything distinctly Thai, yet I also accept that I’m still mourning the recent passing of my favourite Thai whole grilled chicken restaurant, Bangkok Street Thai Bistro.

These dropped catches, however, aren’t capital offences: just caveat emptors for other Thai food enthusiasts. Louder Louder is an excellent restaurant. Floor staff, despite always looking as if they’re one person down, are as friendly as they are fast-moving.

Then again, with 120 seats to its name – plus a karaoke room – Louder Louder’s Vic Park spin-off is a bigger beast than the original Northbridge Louder Louder that co-owner Zero Sukwahrinn opened in 2018. During peak periods, most of those seats are filled, and not just by Thai folk either.

It’s a pleasure to see independent, focused restaurants that are full and being enjoyed: doubly so in locations that you might not, at first, expect to find them. I’ll admit, I often treat “dining” trends with suspicion, but ever-more diverse eating options for our suburban shopping centres? That’s a movement I can get behind. Say it louder (louder) for the people in the backstreets.

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.