This Cozy Thai Cafe Serves Eye-Popping Desserts Until Midnight

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

One of the most charming restaurants I’ve been to in San Francisco is a little Thai cafe that sits on a relatively unobtrusive street corner in Lower Nob Hill, stays open until midnight every night, and serves a menu that’s equal parts impeccable Thai home cooking and gloriously over-the-top desserts.

And that’s only the beginning of the pleasures that Ping Yang Thai Grill & Dessert has to offer.

The restaurant has a cozy, lived-in quality. The walls are lined with succulents, climbing vine plants and other assorted greenery. The steady stream of guitar-driven Thai pop-rock that plays over the speakers was catchy enough to get my head bopping. A small bookshelf is stocked with the same mix of slightly random reading material you might find in a friend’s living room: Harry Potter, The Catcher in the Rye, some test prep workbooks, the Thai translation of the Detective Conan manga.

The menu, too, is optimized with an eye toward homey comfort. Which isn’t to say that the cooking is uninteresting or unambitious. In fact, Ping Yang serves a whole slew of dishes that I rarely see at other Thai restaurants in the Bay Area, like fried silkworms and mok pla — a Lao dish that consists of catfish steamed inside a banana leaf. This is, after all, the kind of Thai restaurant that has a specials board handwritten in Thai, with no translation.

Ping Yang also serves one of the most ubiquitous home-cooked Thai dishes that you’ll only occasionally find at a restaurant: a Thai omelet. This is one of my all-time favorite egg dishes (which, coming from an egg-obsessed person, says a lot) — essentially just egg and fish sauce, whisked together and fried quickly in a hot wok until it’s puffed up and golden-brown. Served over a plate of hot jasmine rice, Ping Yang’s herb-flecked version is simple and supremely comforting, especially when doctored with a few dabs of Sriracha. Left to my own devices, I would happily eat this twice a week.

In a similar comfort food vein: the restaurant’s pad see ew, which, by contrast, is a dish you can find at practically every Thai restaurant in the U.S. But I was enamored with Ping Yang’s homey, oil-slicked version of the dish, which was loaded with vegetables and full of umami without being overly salty. It didn’t hurt that I ordered the version with pork jowl, a luxurious, underrated cut that gives you a little of the fattiness of the belly with a nice, crisp, cartilaginous chew. After applying a few liberal drops of prik nam som (chili vinegar) from the condiment caddy, we inhaled this dish in a matter of minutes.

Again, this is restaurant-quality food cooked with light enough a touch that I could easily imagine myself eating here multiple times a week if I lived in the neighborhood — especially with so much of the menu left to explore, and many of the dishes priced at $15 or less.

Truth be told, I would come even if the food were only half as good, because the vibe at Ping Yang is just so pleasant, welcoming and chill. Half the people who came in during our visit seemed to be regulars or personal friends of the owners, and no one seemed to be in any particular rush. At around 10 o’clock on a Thursday night, a couple of thirtysomething Thai dudes had their laptops out, sipping cold Thai lagers while they worked on a project. Others came in after dinner elsewhere just to share a dessert.

The service, meanwhile, was friendly without being overly familiar. I especially appreciated the conviction with which our server delivered her recommendations when we asked for them. “The pad see ew is my favorite,” she said without a moment’s hesitation when we asked about the noodle dishes. And later, when it was time for dessert, she once again spoke, with absolute certainty, in favor of the watermelon bing soo.

Ah yes, dessert. Can I speak for a moment on how dispiriting I have found it, personally, that there aren’t more dessert shops in the Bay Area open past, say, 9 o’clock? The struggle is real, and if you’ve felt it too, I am here to tell you that Ping Yang is the solution to your woes: It serves a vast Thai and pan-Asian dessert menu until midnight every night. In contrast to the homey, simple quality of the savory foods, the desserts are elaborate and over-the-top in a way that feels made for Instagram — but also entirely delicious.

There are Hong Kong–style toast boxes filled to overflowing with ube ice cream, whipped cream and all manner of fresh fruits. There are variations on the Thai-style dessert rotis that are wildly popular at night markets all across Asia. The banana roti we tried was a deconstructed version — crispy roti wedges piled on a plate and topped with whipped cream, chocolate sauce and condensed milk, with a stack of banana slices arranged neatly on the side. You assemble each perfect bite yourself.

As for that watermelon bing soo? It was fully half of a small, sweet watermelon, served with the carved-out balls of its flesh piled high inside the rind itself. Layered inside was the bing soo, or shaved ice, itself — mixed with condensed milk and shaved so finely that for the first several bites I was convinced it was ice cream.

Let’s just say the recommendation didn’t miss: This was the tastiest, most refreshing dessert I’d eaten in months.

Ping Yang Grill & Dessert is open Monday through Saturday from noon–3 p.m. and 5 p.m.–midnight, and Sunday 5 p.m.–midnight at 955 Larkin St. in San Francisco.