Chef-owner Joi Simmaly makes the noodle soups, sticky rice and sausages he grew up with so they don't get lost or lumped into Thai food.
As a kid growing up in Modesto, Joi Simmaly loved fishing along the Delta with his dad and six brothers. The 8-year-old would skewer just-caught catfish with a stick, smother it in crushed chiles and grill it over a fire pit he dug himself.
In high school, he embarked on what would be a decades-long journey to perfect his own Laotian pork sausages, blistered and stuffed in the traditional way with herbs and aromatics. And in college, it was not uncommon to find Simmaly crouched on the roof of his apartment, air-drying the mustard greens he would later ferment with sticky rice, a staple of Laotian cuisine.
“We’re a very agrarian culture, we still like to hunt and gather,” says Simmaly, the owner of Spicy Joi, a Laotian street food restaurant in Concord. “In that environment, you either learn how to cook your family’s recipes or (the food) basically gets lost. (Laotian elders) don’t write anything down. Nothing is measured.”
Laotian food is still underrepresented in the United States. As a landlocked country, the cuisine is influenced by bordering Thailand and Vietnam, but has its own distinctive dishes and rustic recipes. The Bay Area has a smattering of eateries serving Laotian and Laos-bordering Isan (northern Thai) cuisine, including Hawker Fare in San Francisco and Champa Garden in Oakland. But more often, the cuisine, known for its riot of herbs, chiles and funky, unrefined fish sauce, is an afterthought on a menu dominated by more familiar Thai and Vietnamese dishes.
Simmaly wants to change that. Inspired by James Beard-semifinalist and Washington D.C. chef Seng Luangrath, who started the Lao Food Movement in 2014 to increase awareness and encourage Laotian restaurateurs to serve their own food, Simmaly has flipped the equation. He offers a few Vietnamese sandwiches and a Thai dish, but the majority of his menu, from the handmade noodle soups and sticky rice combo plates to the desserts, are Laotian.
“We are essentially trying to unravel 40 to 50 years of confusion around Thai and Laotian food,” says Simmaly, who opened Spicy Joi in 2022. “They are different, and we want to share our own food with people.”
Simmaly says that even before refugees began arriving in the U.S. shortly after the Vietnam War — his family came in 1981 — it was more common for Laotians to open Thai restaurants because Thai cuisine was already established and accepted, like Chinese food. It made sense back then, he says.
“Restaurants are already high-risk businesses,” he says. “But we’ve come a long way since then.”
Inside Spicy Joi, you’ll spot an eye-catching mural that took Simmaly’s brother-in-law 400 hours to create. Bright tropical flowers and red chiles share the wall with a golden, reclining Buddha. Simmering in the kitchen are pots of traditional noodle soups, like kao soi luangprabang, a minced pork soup with a spicy tomato-fermented soybean broth that is topped with vegetables and flat rice noodles.
Those traditional combo plates are served with crispy pork belly, barbecued chicken or sun-dried pork jerky marinated in soy sauce and brown sugar and served alongside glutinous rice.
“We eat sticky rice with everything,” Simmaly says. “It’s like an edible utensil. You use it to pick up the food you’re eating, a little meat, a little vegetable, and put it in a ball. It’s satiating.”
The rice, steamed in cone-shaped baskets called thip khao, also accompanies a plate of Simmaly’s herb sausages, which he stuffs with onion, lemongrass and kaffir lime.
Simmaly says it is important to keep the integrity of the dishes he grew up with while making them accessible to non-Laotians. For instance, in Laos, the sausages are often left to ferment, which adds a complementary sour note, but Simmaly’s are not. And his jeo makphet, a roasted red pepper dipping sauce, is a sweeter version than the one his mother makes.
“Hers is made with a Sichuan pepper native to northern Laos, and it’s very spicy,” he says. “She’s taught me how to make it four times and says mine is still only 95 percent there.”
In 2016, Simmaly ended what had been a career in insurance and real estate to share his food with the larger community. He took a job as a catering manager in San Ramon and later worked in a Thai restaurant in Danville to learn the business. Eventually, he started selling his sausages to friends and family before opening a pop-up inside Concord’s Rockin’ Crawfish in 2020, which drew fans from as far away as Chico and Bakersfield. Around that time, he perfected his recipe for Lao-American beer, which he makes from Asian purple rice.
By 2021, Simmaly was taking steps to open his own brick and mortar as a way of marrying the “rustic, old-school” flavors of home with a modern, fast-casual Bay Area restaurant.
“I appreciate both but understand the significant gap between the two,” he says. “You try to become assimilated as fast as possible but often end up feeling a little lost. I’ve always wanted to contribute to filling that loss through the food.”
