Sapp Coffee Shop

Sapp Coffee Shop
5183 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90027
(323) 665-1035

For the Asian Couple, any visit to Los Angeles is ultimately an excuse to visit Thai Town. Such a visit poses a classic noodly dilemma: Sapp's or Ord? Separated by three blocks, these two nondescript spots are competing monuments to noodle perfection in my mental geography. They are the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock, the Empire State and the Chrysler Building, the Eiffel Tower and the Champ Elysees, T-Pain and The Dream. Whlie Ord excels at a wide variety of noodle soups, always teasing us with something new, torturing us with the unbearable anxiety of choice, Sapp is the undisputed thai boat noodle soup champ:

I've recently learned that the broth is a mixture of beef broth, pork blood, herbs and spices. Floating in that are bits of beef, fried pork rind, tendon, liver, chili, and one of my favorites, beef ball. The magic of the boat noodle bowl lies in the density of the thing. Taste the broth. We're talking sweet, salty, hot and sour, all balanced precariously against each other. The flavors are all there, but they take their time revealing themselves, letting one flavor take the spotlight, then the next. Then you get into the soup itself and its an index of texture: soft noodle, chewy tendon, rubbery beef ball, crunchy rind. Sapp's thai boat noodle is a catalogue of sensation, a census of noodle soup possibilities. If this noodle soup were an abstract expressionist,  it would be Jackson Pollock: messy, rural, startingly original, cerebral yet accessible, a paradoxical artist of brute means but refined effects. 

The second noodle at Sapp that is worthy of our accclaimation is the Jade Noodle, which is a refined, but contested entry into the NSP simply because it is served in two modes: dry and soupy. I got it dry:

This of course raises several issues. Chief among them the question of this thing's status as a noodle soup. However, since the jade noodles are completely delicious AND available as a noodle soup, I think it deserves to be here. What's in jade noodles? I confess I'm not entirely sure. I am almost certain that there were duck bits, crab bits and roast pork bits, along with cilantro and a green noodle that, upon further inspection, reveals itself to be leprauchan hair, which is delicious. The noodles arrive at the table dry and slightly warm, hiding underneath it a tasty sauce, crushed peanuts and green onions. The jade noodles, to my knowledge, are only to be found at Sapp's. It is a thing of restrained beauty -- elegant, deceptively simple, offering an unexpected combination of elements. It is Brice Marden to the boat noodle-as-Jackson-Pollock.