™A Two-Man Mango Sticky Rice Stand Has a Line Down Temple Street
Apinatt Watthanavanit expected a few dozen orders a day. Since a viral video, his stand sells out within two hours.
On a Tuesday afternoon in Historic Filipinotown, the line on West Temple Street takes half an hour to reach one mango sticky rice stand. The only sign is a hand-drawn A-frame, and it lists the whole menu: mango sticky rice and Thai tea, Eater LA reported Friday.
Apinatt Watthanavanit opened the stand in May as a side project and figured it'd do a few dozen orders a day for the neighborhood, he told Eater. Then in August, creator Aysha Harun posted a video about it that's gathered more than 26,000 likes. Now the stand runs out in an hour or two, people queue before it opens, and the fastest sell-out so far took 45 minutes. Watthanavanit called the whole thing "incredibly humbling."
Los Angeles isn't short on mango sticky rice. What it's lining up for here is a two-man setup that still makes one dessert and one drink, run by a guy who grew up around Thai food and markets where the dish gets real care. "If the mango isn't perfect, the dish isn't good," Watthanavanit told Eater.
That rule runs the menu. The fruit rotates with the season, Ataulfo some weeks and Keitt others, and flyers taped up along the line name that day's mango and how sweet it is. The sticky rice and the coconut cream, which Eater describes as walking a line between sweet and salty, are made fresh every day.
And when no mango is ripe enough, there's no sticky rice at all. Those days, the stand sells only tea.
So the first-timer's order more or less picks itself: the mango sticky rice, plus a Thai tea, which most people at the front of the line were carrying off with their boxes, according to Eater.
The stand sets up in a parking lot at 2006 W. Temple St., Tuesday through Sunday, starting at 4 p.m. and going until it's gone. It won't run all year, either: Watthanavanit plans to pause once the mangoes aren't good enough anymore. "The season depends on the mango, not on us," he told Eater.
Source: la.eater.com, retrieved October 10, 2026.
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