Sarintip “Jazz” Singsanong

Sarintip “Jazz” Singsanong’s Jitlada is famed around Los Angeles for its spicy Southern Thai cooking. Singsanong is a native of a small town in Thailand, where she grew up eating “all seafood” until she moved to Bangkok, and later to the United States, after her mother won a lottery visa and “we all got green cards and made our dreams.” Below, she tells us more about herself, and her answer to those who ask for her recipes.

Q. What do you wake up to?
A. My alarm clock.

Q. What music have you listened to today?
A. I love the Beatles. I started learning English songs with “Let It Be”.

Q. What is your favorite word?
A. Love and care. I always say that to customers if they want to know my recipes.

Q. What do you find beautiful?
A. Nature. The full moon and the sun.

Q. How would you describe yourself in five words or fewer?
A. Friendly, happy, religious, honest and too energetic.

Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A. I wanted to be a writer but I never had the chance. I write a lot of poems, but they’re all under my bed-I never bring them out.

Q. What is your favorite cocktail?
A. Gin 7-Up.

Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?
A. I’d love to see Switzerland because I love chocolate.

Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?
A. I’d be myself. I love being me. Maybe I’d learn more cooking.

Q. What is your favorite holiday and why?
A. New Year’s. We get to see all the family.

Q. What is your fondest childhood memory?
A. Cooking for all my brothers and sisters…. Everybody said, ‘You make the best food in town,’ even though I was so little.

Q. What is your most prized material possession?
A. I think my kids. They are the world to me, my two daughters.

Q. What promise do you make to yourself that you break the most often?
A. I can never balance the checkbook.

Q. What should you throw away but haven’t been able to part with?
A. Oh everything, I keep everything. My husband hates it.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead that you’d most love to have a beer with?
A. Oprah Winfrey.

*Photo by Aaron Salcido.