"You have to be adventurous," says Phuoc Nguyen, the young host and manager (as well as the guy who put in the new bar and blond wood wainscoting) at Champa Garden in Oakland's San Antonio district.

At Champa Garden, the nearly 6-year-old Thai and Lao restaurant off Hilltop Drive in east Redding, the most popular menu item, not surprisingly, is pad thai. When I was there for lunch last week I was ...

After my first visit to Champa Garden, I had no real desire to return. A lunch plate of spicy cashews with chicken was anything but spicy and had very few cashews. This was the type of thing that I, a ...

The first San Francisco location of acclaimed East Bay Laotian restaurant Champa Garden is now open in a quiet corner off Ocean Avenue in Ingleside. Like the original, the menu is fairly expansive, ...