BY KEELIN EVERLY-LANG for WEEKLY VOLCANO | 7/10/2026
Tucked into a Hosmer storefront is a portal to dishes featuring freshly made chili paste and unique Thai dishes that are hard to find in a typical restaurant.
Kamlai Thai opened in 2023 and features a large menu and a dedication to authentic ingredients and techniques from a local family.
Kamlai Layoo and Apichit (Don) Tohngam raised their two children just a few minutes from the restaurant. They opened the restaurant together with Layoo’s brother, Rungrot Siribun.
Layoo worked for years in the restaurant industry as she dreamed about what she would do differently if she had her own place.
Kamlai Thai is located at 8425 S. Hosmer St., Suite D, in Tacoma, where the family took over the former Sweet Rice, which served Lao and Thai food.
The former owner has another Sweet Rice location in Auburn.
“I’ve been working in restaurants for a long time, collecting a lot of ideas,” Layoo said.
While there’s nothing wrong with fusion, Layoo said she likes to keep traditional cooking techniques alive in her dishes.
Yum Naem Khao Tod is a popular street food in Thailand that combines crispy fried rice with pork sausage, fresh herbs, peanuts, and a tangy dressing. It is eaten wrapped in lettuce.
“I like to keep it more authentic because it represents who I am, and I can show off my culture,” Layoo said.
As just one example, she puts fresh lemongrass and galangal in every bowl of her Tom Yum soup. At one restaurant where she worked, she said, the cooks would put those ingredients in the main pot but not give each customer the fresh herbs in their bowl.
Giving customers these authentic flavors has become easier over the years as the ingredients she needs have become more widely available.
The cost of importing some ingredients has increased lately because of tariffs. While she said it can be a positive thing to have more investment in local production, there are some ingredients, such as coconut milk, that cannot be produced in the United States and have become much more expensive because of the tariffs.
Kamlai Thai currently has a large menu with a wide variety of dishes, including a menu of specials that are hard to find at other Thai restaurants.
These include items such as Nam Jim Jaew, a classic deep-fried tilapia dish with homemade Jaew sauce, and Guay Jub, which features rolled rice noodles with crispy pork belly, pork offal, tofu, and egg in a five-spice pork broth.
Boat Noodle soup is another specialty. It includes pork, meatballs, bean sprouts, and pork blood, which is fully cooked in the boiling broth and adds thickness and richness to the soup.
These and other specialty dishes represent traditional Thai flavors that are hard to find locally, Layoo said. When she’s been craving these dishes in the past, she’s taught herself how to make them and now loves to share them with others.
Maintaining such a large menu and the level of authenticity is a challenge because of the cost of both labor and ingredients. In the future, she said, she may simplify the menu to make it easier to manage.
At this stage, though, she’s using the large menu to evaluate what customers like most and what she wants to keep. She’s definitely planning to keep sharing these unique specials.
Before opening the restaurant, she would often cater and help prepare meals at their local Buddhist temple. When people tasted her cooking, she said, they would often tell her she should sell her food or even open a restaurant.
Now, when she gets that compliment, she gets to hand them a copy of the Kamlai Thai menu.
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