Monthien Tang, better known as Aunty La, at the Avondale Sunday Market. Photo / Amanda Saxton
Monthien Tang, better known as Aunty La, at the Avondale Sunday Market. Photo / Amanda Saxton
With flowers in her hair, "Aunty La" has served Thai food at Avondale Sunday Market for decades. Amanda Saxton tries it out.
A man in a Hunting & Fishing beanie recently told me that "Aunty La and Uncle Tuoi taught this old Māori fulla to love chilli oil". We wereat the Avondale Sunday Market, each with a steaming bowl of Thai combination noodle soup ($15). I dithered over whether or not a spoonful of deep red, flame-hot condiment would combust my ability to enjoy more subtle flavours. Sixty-one-year-old James Kawiti urged me on. He drives down from the Hokianga every few months to stock up on tubs of the stuff.
"I've been eating here for 20 years … this place is close to my heart," Kawiti continued. "It's the way Aunty La treats people. Her aroha. She's famous around here, ask anyone."
Monthien Tang - better known as Aunty La - is an Avondale institution. A sunbeam of a woman, with flowers in her hair and jokes for loyal customers, in the sunshine-yellow food truck she operates with her husband, Sisongkhami Sirisomphone (better known as Uncle Tuoi). People queue for the couple's noodle soups and golden, crisply blistered pork crackling. They snap up assorted $4 skewers: satay chicken, barbecue pork, moneybags, pork balls, Thai sausage. Her home-made chilli oil, infused with dried shrimp, ginger and lemongrass, reels in others.
Aunty La's recipes are from Thailand, but 54-year-old Tang and 61-year-old Sirisomphone hail from neighbouring Laos. They are refugees who fled the aftermath of a proxy war between Cold War powers. In the 60s and 70s, America dropped enough bombs on Laos to make it the world's most heavily bombed country per capita. Yet the Soviet-backed communists won, remaining in power today.
Sirisomphone reached New Zealand in 1979. Tang arrived in 1985. They met at an Auckland nightclub and married in the early 90s. Together, they've owned three restaurants: Vietnamese, then Thai, then Thai again. It's easier to convince New Zealanders to eat cuisines they're already familiar with, Sirisomphone says (even though Laos food, when cooked by his mum, is "the best in the world"). The food truck at the Avondale Market has been their side-hustle for decades. Since Covid killed the couple's last Thai restaurant, it's become their main source of income. Tang and Sirisomphone spend four days prepping for the market each week. A friend, sibling or one of their three kids usually helps out behind the counter on Sundays.
To find Aunty La's, head from the market parking lot to the Poetry is Great lady. You'll know her by her sign. She's long guarded the market's entrance, singing sweetly while strumming her guitar. Continue straight. You'll pass purveyors of fluffy slippers and jars labelled "homemade salted fish". Racks of knock-off Louis Vuitton and an extensive selection of woks. Fruit, vegetable, and flower stalls emerge on your right. A flea market materialises on your left. Then comes the crucial "cash out" stall (most vendors here are cash only). Keep going past a small courtyard where congee and hot donuts are sold. Hold out for Thai. If you get to a key cutter, you've gone too far. Aunty La's is on his left.
A few picnic tables squeeze in next to the food truck. These fill up fast, so I took my noodle soup round to the racecourse side of the stadium. Market days, incidentally, are far more hectic than race days in Avondale. I sat between singing Christian evangelists and the tool bazaar, glad I'd said yes to chilli oil. It did not overwhelm. It warmed and perked and blossomed in my mouth, leaving a lingering tingle. The soup (a melee of skewered beef balls, shredded chicken, deep-fried dumplings, mung beans, coriander, egg noodles - and an unidentified sweet-tasting orange gristle) would have been a tad bland without it.
You know what isn't bland? Crowds at the Avondale Market. As I ate, I watched rambunctious kids wield toy guns and hot dogs. Women in saris haggle hard over bric-a-brac. A man with a sausage dog under one arm and a chainsaw under the other tries picking up a painting. Shopping bags looked fit to burst with fresh snapper, bargain beetroot and obscenely shaped daikon. New Zealand's largest and longest running market offers a dose of humanity that feels rather like Aunty La's chilli oil.
