Bucolic spa-like music greets you at this longtime northern Thai favorite, which occupies a strip mall storefront in the southeast L.A. County hamlet of Norwalk. Renu Nakorn, named for a town in northern Thailand, launched the career of original owner Saipin Chutima, who moved to Las Vegas and founded Lotus of Siam, which has long been considered one of the top Thai restaurants in the United States. Umpa Sripetwannadee has owned Renu Nakorn for the past decade, a stretch that includes two years of forced closure that allowed the landlord to renovate the plaza. If that didn’t happen, there would no doubt be even more accolades on the yellow walls.

My latest mission to Renu Nakorn was designed to find this week’s Dose of Vitamin P, and it worked, as expected. My waitress said her favorite pork dish on the menu is Kang Hung-Lay ($6.95), which translates from Thai as “pork stew Northern style.” The Burmese influenced pork curry struck a good balance of spicy, salty, sweet and sour. The murky reddish-brown liquid featured chunks of springy pork fat that imparted rich flavor. The stew also involved curry paste, tamarind juice, ginger, yellow spice-stained garlic cloves and other spices, which all infused the cubes of flavorful but ultimately overcooked pork. Despite the meat’s texture, the flavor was still strong enough to propel the dish to this week’s porcine pedestal.

Dose of Vitamin P spotlights my favorite pork dish from the previous week.