The Lao sausage at Sweet Rice Tacoma is proudly made in-house
The menu at Sweet Rice, a Lao-focused restaurant in Tacoma’s South End, doesn’t loudly boast homemade this or housemade that. If you didn’t ask, you might leave without realizing the sai oua, a pork sausage fragrant with lemongrass, makrut lime leaf and galangal, is encased right here at 8425 S. Hosmer St.
A blend of ground pork shoulder and chunks of pork belly — more fat, more flavor — receives the herbal treatment, evident even before first bite. Punctuated with fish sauce and ripe with garlic and shallots, cilantro and Thai chile, it’s simultaneously earthy, like a well-brewed cup of tea, and indulgent, finished in the deep-fryer, lending a surprising crisp unachievable on the grill.
It’s unlike any Western sausage, bratwurst or hot Italian. It’s not rolled between buns or plopped into pasta but sliced and served with sticky rice, preferably rolled into a consumable tablespoon in the palm of your hand. It’s the kind of magical flavor profile you try once and then give up your day-job to replicate that moment, scouring meat markets for pork intestine casings to make your own — until you return to Sweet Rice and say thank you for being here.
The woman behind the magic goes only by “auntie”, a member of the Saysana family who generously allowed her nephew and niece to reveal some, but not all, of her secrets.
“Her husband doesn’t even know the recipe!” laughed Robert Saysana, owner of the Tacoma restaurant with his cousin Diana.
Inspired by his uncle’s success with the Sweet Rice concept in Dallas, Texas, Saysana opened the first Washington location in Auburn two years ago. While retaining his auto repair business, he followed with the South End location last fall.
“Growing up, food was where our family bonded,” he told The News Tribune in May. “I love our food, I love our culture, and I saw that ... there wasn’t that much Lao culture around.”
There are Lao families that own restaurants in the area, he said, but they tend to cook more familiar Thai dishes. Lao cuisine — funkier, spicier, more bitter — leans on herbs, dried chiles and the fermented funk of paedek, a more pungent and opaque fish sauce.
SWEET RICE WA CENTERS ON LAO FOOD
The Laotian people likely traveled from what is now southwest China, pushing into modern-day Laos and northern Thailand (then Siam) in the 12th and 13th centuries. The French — who controlled the region from the early 20th century through World War II and again through the 1954 Geneva Accords — demarcated the Mekong River as the border between Thailand and Laos. As James Shyabout, a Lao immigrant and celebrated chef of Commis in San Francisco and Hawker Fare in Oakland, told Serious Eats in 2019, this line is but “a political border.”
Violence that spilled into Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War killed thousands and displaced thousands more. More than 250,000 people of Lao heritage, plus 327,000 Hmong, live in the U.S. according to to Pew Research Center and the Census Bureau, 20 percent on the West Coast. About 11,000 live in Seattle and Portland.
To say Sweet Rice is the South Sound’s first Laotian restaurant overlooks the northern Thai, or Isaan, specialties served, for example, at Loak Toung in Central Tacoma and Ban Somtum in Federal Way. The former’s Isaan sausage is also guarded by a single person (a.k.a. it’s an elusive order). The latter offers sai ua, the northern Thai version sprinkled with turmeric and curry, and sai krok, dotted with ginger and sticky rice. Other crossover dishes include larb or laab, a heap of minced meat bright with lime, red onion and cilantro, scooped into lettuce wraps, and som tum.
Most U.S. restaurants with papaya salad serve the Thai version, citrus-forward with lime and tamarind and peanuts. The Isaan/Lao recipe wrangles both fish sauce and the fermented naam plaa raa, plus crab paste and salted black crab. The result at Sweet Rice is a crash-course in fermented flavors, unapologetically spicy and satisfyingly seaworthy.
“People who are more familiar with the food are more open to the funkiness,” explained Liz Hampton, Saysana’s sister and Sweet Rice’s manager. “They’ll always try it, and if they don’t love it, they’ll go back to what they’re used to.”
But that’s not their hope. They hope you learn to love those differences.
Ask for a recommendation and they will guide you toward the items marked as Lao. Extra orders of sticky rice — prepared by soaking in water for several hours, then steamed traditionally in a bamboo basket until it shapes itself into a luscious starchy mound — ease that choice, whether alongside the sausage, the bite-sized riblets or the crispy chicken skins dipped in jeo som, an endorphin-boosting sweet-and-sour sauce.
“We’ve kinda been hiding behind the Thai name,” said Saysana, postulating that their parents’ generation timidly approached introducing new flavors to then-novice American palates. “We know what people are looking for and how to market it.”
The siblings launched the Auburn location shortly before their mother lost her battle with lung cancer. She had been skeptical: “You guys can’t even cook the food!” recalled Hampton, a new mother herself who now cooks Lao food at home more frequently than ever.
Their father left Laos a refugee at 17. He landed in rural Pennsylvania, eventually moving to the Tacoma area. He, too, hesitated when his children, born and raised in America, wanted to open a restaurant.
“He’s proud of this,” said Saysana.
SWEET RICE TACOMA
▪ 8425 S. Hosmer St., Tacoma, 253-507-5618, sweetricewa.com/tacoma
▪ 4017 A St. SE, Auburn, 253-333-6677, sweetricewa.com/auburn-menus
▪ Hours: Tuesday-Thursday 10:30 a.m.-8 p.m., Friday 10:30 a.m.-9 p.m. (closed 2-3 p.m. weekdays), Saturday 11 a.m.-9 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m.-7 p.m.
▪ Details: Lao specialties sprinkled with Thai staples, most dishes $7-$15; dine-in or takeout, order online or by phone
This story was originally published May 19, 2021 at 5:05 AM.