Lifestyle
This energetic dance party hides in a tiny L.A. bar — no cover, no line, no RSVPs
Under red lights, a man in a cowboy hat swings his partner around a crowded dance floor. House and disco music play from a makeshift DJ booth. A tattooed woman with long, red fingernails grips a Buddha-shaped beer bottle. A fashionable couple takes selfies in matching red trucker hats emblazoned with the words “Thai Angel.” They’re two of the many patrons proud to show their loyalty to the bar-restaurant hosting this lively scene. It’s late on a Saturday night in February and just a few hours earlier, there was no DJ and no dancing. Just regulars eating drunken noodles and fried rice at this unassuming spot in Koreatown.
But when Thai Angel’s tiny kitchen closes, the party starts. Through a community of devout regulars and an owner that embraces them, it’s quietly become a drama-free, all-are-welcome place to dance from 9 p.m. until last call just before 2 a.m. No RSVP, no cover, no line outside.
Bartenders Maddox and Isabella serving drinks behind the bar.
A woman indulges in a slice of pizza.
In the back of the L-shaped room, the bathroom line buzzes with strangers bonding over how they found Thai Angel and flexing how many times they’ve visited. It’s the type of conversation you’d expect somewhere like Spotlight, a dress-to-impress nightclub that recently opened in Hollywood, or at an underground warehouse party in East L.A. or downtown. But some young L.A. partygoers are tired of corporate-feeling clubs and exclusive or ticketed events. They’ve gone back to basics — favoring casual bar environments. Gen Z’s recent discovery of 100-year-old Barney’s Beanery has made the late-night roadhouse as hard to get into as the spots the new crowd was seemingly trying to avoid. Thai Angel has no glamorous Hollywood backstory or viral TikTok posts, yet its dance floor is packed.
Jamie Eich, 58, opened the first iteration of Thai Angel, named after her daughter, in 1995 as a karaoke bar in Hollywood. Eight years ago, on her daughter Salanya “Angel” Inm’s 21st birthday, Jamie asked what she wanted. “A bar,” she answered. The current Thai Angel location on Western Avenue was her birthday gift. Thai Angel is co-owned by Jamie, Angel and her brother Boss Inm, 36. After college, Angel, now 29, began working as a waitress and bartender. Boss and Jamie are behind the bar at Thai Angel every day. Angel, who also works as a reiki practitioner and model, is preparing to open an alcohol-free tea lounge upstairs.
The family never set out to make Thai Angel a nightlife hot spot. Sure, it poured strong drinks and stayed open late, but the first DJs to throw parties in the space were just regulars slurping down pad see ew at the bar.
Angel, left, Jamie and Boss, the family team steering Thai Angel.
A pulsating crowd vibes to the beats of the DJ.
Most people inside tonight found the space through a party called SOUP. In 2020, eight friends in the music industry, including Swedish pop star Tove Lo, were looking for a place to throw an informal DJ night. They looked for a venue across L.A. but couldn’t find the right fit, eventually giving up and grabbing a late-night dinner. They ended up at Thai Angel.
The first SOUP was days before the city issued pandemic stay-at-home orders in March 2020. The friends have since put on 13 events at the restaurant. Throwing dance parties at Thai Angel requires promoters to bring in their own DJ and speaker setup, but the environment is worth it.
“People have really responded to the unique feel of Thai Angel and the fun concept of SOUP’s quick DJ rotation,” says SOUP member Samuel Luria. “The setting has a lot to do with it. L.A. nightlife is filled with things worth avoiding … there are plenty of douchey clubs, trendy bars and overpriced and pretentious mixology. There are also fun spots where the owners have applied care and vision in order to create a fun and unique environment. Thai Angel is one of those spots.”
On party nights, the eight friends arrive early to enjoy an off-menu vegan tom kha soup prepared by Jamie, with plenty of leftovers for the rest of the week.
Tonight, the crowd at Thai Angel is courtesy of DJ collective Friends of Friends of Friends. Previously, they threw house parties and DJed the occasional wedding, but the trio was inspired by SOUP and began throwing events at Thai Angel last September. “Jamie immediately welcomed us as her family,” said co-founder Collin Sommers. “For a city known for its glitz and glam, there’s a lot of authenticity in the spaces below the surface. Thai Angel is just one story, amongst many in L.A., of a women-owned, family-owned business that truly foster community.”
Jamie, who is a single mother, enjoys her role as welcoming committee and secondary mom to Thai Angel patrons. Some regulars don’t know her first name and refer to her only as “Mom.” She encourages it. A handwritten note tacked to the bar displays her username for digital payments as “Thai-Mom.” The nickname was popularized by DJ and actor Ian Alexander Jr., who died by suicide at 26. Jamie credits him for throwing weekly DJ nights starting in 2018 that laid the foundation for Thai Angel to become an if-you-know-you-know nightlife spot. “He loved doing it. He’d greet me with ‘Hi, Mom, how are you?’ He made this place pop. I think that he’s still here with us,” she said.
A vibrant crowd energizes the dance floor.
Angel believes the family dynamic is responsible for the warm and welcoming environment. “It’s a very small, narrow space. It’s cozy. In my mind it really does feel like a living room, a house party. People come here and they feel at home,” she says.
In addition to this spot, Jamie owns two bars in Bangkok, also named Thai Angel. “We set goals here. Like Nike said, just do it,” Jamie says.
At midnight, a man bobs and weaves through the crowd holding a stack of giant pizza boxes. Jamie immediately waves him over to the last booth, where he begins giving out slices for free. Scotty Chappell, co-owner of Swizzle Pizza, an East Hollywood pop-up, has been coming to Thai Angel for seven years. He initially stumbled in while working at a restaurant down the street. Before opening Swizzle, Chappell and his business partners experimented with serving Thai pizzas out of the Thai Angel oven.
“Thai Angel has always been there for us. It’s a chosen family in a city where that feels so hard to find. We’re there for them too, whether it’s helping them close up on busy nights, taking out the trash, washing dishes or bringing in a ton of pizza to feed a party so they can actually have a break from cooking their delicious Thai food,” Chappell says.
At 1 a.m., the dance floor shows no signs of slowing down. Jamie has changed into a “I <3 Thai Angel” T-shirt. Angel is passing out homemade lemon bars, courtesy of a regular who calls the bar their “Cheers.” Across Los Angeles, the Saturday night crowd is waiting in line for a hot bar or racking up an Uber bill as they search for the next better party. If only they knew what was hiding in plain sight.
Follow Thai Angel on Instagram @thaiangelbar for information about upcoming events.
Sunday Puzzle
NPR
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NPR
On-air challenge
I’m going to give you two five-letter words. Add the same two letters at the end of the first one and the start of the second one, in each case to complete a familiar seven-letter word.
Ex. Later Ready –> LATERAL/ALREADY
1. Habit Tempt
2. Laten Press
3. Blank Ching
4. Since Venue
5. Shack Groom
6. Surge Stage
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge came from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?
Answer: Los Angeles –> Laos, Senegal
Winner
Elaine Neel of Derby, Kansas.
This week’s challenge
Next weekend will be the 186th convention of the National Puzzler League, in Bloomington, Ind., which I’ll be attending as always. Two other people who will be there are Henri Picciotto and Joshua Kosman, who created this week’s challenge. Name two words that are opposites. They share a single letter. Remove that shared letter from each word, put a hyphen between the two starting words, and you’ll get a term you sometimes see in food ads. What are the two words?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 9 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
An illustration of the Boston Tea Party, when colonists dumped British East India Company tea into the harbor on Dec. 16, 1773. Some accounts say this marked a pivotal moment when Americans started loving coffee. But one historian says Americans were drinking lots of coffee before then.
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A consequential act of defiance secured tea’s place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America’s colonial era.
The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.
But tea wasn’t the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America’s fight for independence.
Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.
As the United States celebrates 250 years, here’s what to know about America’s early history of coffee.
Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed
Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.
“The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower” in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.
“The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it,” McDonald says. “A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century.”
The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.
The Boston Tea Party probably wasn’t the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim
On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.
Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.
The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government’s passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.
To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It’s why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father’s now-famous letter.
In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.
” ‘No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.’ Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better,” Adams wrote.
Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.
She studied advertisements from the 1760s and ’70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, “coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is.”
A big reason? It was cheaper. “Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers.”
Historians say it’s hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.
And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.
“There is a vast amount of smuggling,” says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. “So they’re not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They’re probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean.”
And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren’t always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. “I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company,” she posits someone of the era saying. “But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee.”
Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas
A coffeepot with cover, circa 1795. It has an American eagle motif, made in China for the American market. Coffee was part of a growing trend of globalization in the colonial era.
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In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.
“Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things,” says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.
A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.
In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed “penny universities,” Pendergrast says: “because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything.” The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.
Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.
“There’s a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it’s because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather,” historian McDonald says. “That’s where they heard about the economics of the day.”
Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers’ horses. They were also more likely to have food.
Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.
But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could “riotously drink together” in taverns, coffeehouses often didn’t allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.
“The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal,” she says. “Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled.”
Still, she says, the lines between the two “weren’t completely clear.”
The cost of America’s revolutionary drink
Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.
Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.
Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. “Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities,” says Chaplin.
As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. “They’re both becoming affordable luxuries,” Chaplin says.
Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.
“These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff,” says Chaplin. “The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world.”
There’s a dark side to coffee’s history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world’s coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.
The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.
Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America’s fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.
“Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought,” Pendergrast says. “But it was also grown by slaves.”
Just in time for a contentious 250th anniversary of the United States of America, historian David S. Reynolds’ latest book, Two Ships, helps us realize that any country that couldn’t agree on its own origin story is destined for divisive times.
Two Ships is about the complicated, conjoined legacy of the landings of the Mayflower, which carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, and the White Lion, which arrived in Jamestown a year earlier, bringing the first enslaved Africans to Virginia.
As Reynolds demonstrates, it’s not so much the facts of these two voyages, as it is the meanings ascribed to them, that made them such a powerful metaphor for two conflicting visions of American identity.
To simplify, the Mayflower’s passengers were separatist Puritans, dissenters to the reign of the English king, James I. As the United States developed, the Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the New World, one in which all men (in theory, at least) were equal before God.
In contrast, the European settlers of Jamestown were Royalists, also known as Cavaliers. Loyal to the monarchy, they believed in a strict hierarchy.
But the meaning of the images of the two ships shifted depended on who was invoking them and when. Not surprisingly, the metaphor was deployed most vigorously during the Civil War. In abolitionist speeches and writings, the White Lion or the “Slave-Ship,” as it was commonly called, was condemned for infecting America with the “plague-spot” of slavery.
Reynolds says that Frederick Douglass resorted to the “two ships” metaphor frequently, while Lincoln avoided it, hoping to preserve a unified ship of state. Meanwhile, Southern descendants of Cavaliers invoked the Mayflower to emphasize the intolerance and “cruel, persecuting” character of the Puritans. In a comment that resonates for our own times, Reynolds says:
It didn’t matter to the South that … by the mid-nineteenth century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious denominations, …, few of which resembled the faith of the Plymouth colonists. Distortion is intrinsic to cultural memory, especially when amplified by sectional or political bias. For Southerners, the Mayflower had brought Puritanism, which had yielded fanatical movements like abolitionism, now a dire threat to the Union.
In a brief-but-fascinating digression into the unpredictable power of literary fiction, Reynolds observes that the South’s fondness for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-Puritan novel, The Scarlet Letter, and, even more, for the medieval historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, bolstered its nostalgia for a largely-imagined feudal society.
Reynolds quotes the always-quotable Mark Twain, no fan of Scott’s, as saying that Scott “did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote …”
Two Ships is a dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history through a close reading of a metaphor. By the 1890s, Reynolds says, the interpretive tide had turned again: “Southern and Northern whites, feeling threatened by people of color and by an array of European immigrants, were retreating to a cocoon of racial solidarity that Mayflower celebrations helped reinforce.”
By the later-20th century, the image of the Mayflower was depoliticized and commercialized into Pilgrim hats and Black Friday sales. The powerful metaphor of the two ships receded into the mist.
Seven years ago, however, the 1619 Project piloted the White Lion — “The Slave-Ship” — back into view and anchored it at the center of debates about slavery’s place in the national story. The 1619 Project has been faulted for its historiography, and it does lie outside of the chronological boundaries of Reynolds’ book; still, it seems too momentous a reappearance of the White Lion not to at least acknowledge in this book.
That criticism noted, I think reading Two Ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular Fourth of July. It’s wise for all of us to have a more informed awareness of how Americans have understood, misunderstood and, often, flattened each other into stereotypes. Or, as Ernest Hemingway, one of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ more cynical descendants, might say in response to that sentiment: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
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