Over the past few years, Yotaka and Alex Martin have achieved nothing less than a total reinvention of the standard by which Thai restaurants in Phoenix are measured. With a heartfelt hat tip to Glai Baan for raising the bar and setting the stage, Lom Wong stepped into a city brimming with halfhearted Americanized dishes and challenged Phoenix diners to embrace Thai cuisine on its own terms. That tremendous gamble that has paid off in spades, mostly because the food at Lom Wong is so flipping good that even Americanized Thai fans set in their ways are left agape. Eschewing the big city Bangkok-style of their contemporaries (there's no pad Thai, get over it), the Martins have focused instead on faithfully re-creating the hyperlocal specialties of rural Thailand, with a particular focus on the Moklen cuisine of southern Thailand and the northern cuisine of Yotaka's native Chiang Rai. They pound their own curry pastes, squeeze their own coconut milk and cut their own noodles, resulting in a wild display of technicolor flavors unparalleled in this town and — to be frank — in most of the country.