The East Bay’s Best Late-Night Lao Restaurant Is Inside a Bowling Alley

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene. This week, guest artist — and competitive league bowler — Raynato Castro joined the fray.

A few minutes before 9 o’clock on a recent Saturday night, the line of prospective customers that looped around the Castro Village Bowl parking lot was as long and as energized as any nightclub queue. Inside, a pair of burly armed guards in full tactical gear scanned each person with metal detectors with the brusque efficiency of a TSA screening.

Once we got past the security checkpoint, though, the vibe could scarcely have been more cheerful and family-friendly — your typical bowling alley mix of young couples, chatty teens and heavy-set dudes in baseball caps. We’d all come for the Castro Valley bowling alley’s Friday and Saturday night “unlimited bowling” promotion: a $20 cover charge, shoe-rental inclusive, to bowl as many games as we could squeeze in between 9 and 11 p.m.

It is, my bowling-conversant friends tell me, about as good a deal as you can find in the Bay Area. And Castro Village Bowl is one of the region’s last remaining independent bowling alleys.

Of course, we had another mission, too: We’d heard that Lucky Lane 33 Cafe, the snack bar inside the bowling alley, doubles as one of the finest Laotian and Thai restaurants in the East Bay — almost certainly the best that stays open past 10 p.m. most nights. The idea of racking up a slew of strikes while munching on nam khao and funky, fish sauce–spiked papaya salad? Impossible to resist.

Unfortunately, we’d miscalculated. As it turns out, Lucky Lane 33 does stay open late for these weekend unlimited bowling nights. But it stops serving its Lao-Thai menu (the whole reason we’d come!) after 8. There was no turning back, though. We’d already paid the cover charge and picked out our bowling balls. So all we could do was choose from the cafe’s other food offerings — quite a vast selection, it turns out. Lucky Lane is just a concessions window in the middle of the bowling alley, and yes, it sells your obligatory hot dogs, chicken strips, jalapeño poppers and mozzarella sticks. But even without dipping into the Lao specials, we were able to order a mostly Asian-leaning spread that far exceeded our expectations for bowling alley food.

Who knew, for instance, that crab rangoon makes for an ideal hand-held bowling snack? Yes, these fried wontons are purely an American invention, but something about the crunch of the wrappers and the burst of hot, savory cream cheese filling hit just right when we gobbled these down between frames. And while the pork skewers we ordered were a bit bland and dry, I feel confident declaring that the Thai angel wings were the best chicken wings I’ve ever had at a bowling alley — bite-sized but plump and super-crispy, coated with a sweet and spicy glaze that satisfied our craving for fish sauce.

Maybe because we’d seemed so sad about not being able to order off the Lao menu, the owner did offer us a plate of homemade, sesame seed–flecked Lao-style beef jerky, which was as crunchy as thick potato chip shards. Also proffered: a bag of Thai lotus cookies shaped like beautiful flowers — nutty, sesame seed–tinged, incredibly tasty flowers — at least until I dropped the entire bag onto the ground and they all shattered into a hundred tiny pieces. We also ordered a sleeve of tater tots because why not.

But all this was just a teaser. The good news is that Lucky Lane 33 serves its more specialized Lao-Thai menu until closing time every other night — as late as 10:30 p.m. on Wednesdays and Thursdays, for instance. So when we came back again the following week, we were able to eat our fill of all those pungent, spicy Lao flavors we’d been craving.

We knew the place was legit when we ordered the Lao-style papaya salad and the owner asked us not just how spicy we wanted it, but exactly how many chilies we wanted. Three, it turns out, was the perfect number — right at the limit of our tolerance, and hot enough to light up all of the pleasure synapses in our brains. On the owner’s suggestion, we ordered a bag of chicken cracklings to eat with the salad, and the combination of flavors and textures was as wonderful as she’d promised.

Lucky Lane 33 Cafe is located inside Castro Village Bowl at 3501 Village Dr. in Castro Valley. The restaurant is open Mondays and Tuesdays 4–9 p.m., Wednesday through Friday 4–10:30 p.m., Saturday 1–10:30 p.m. and Sunday 1–9 p.m. On Friday and Saturday nights, when the bowling alley has its late-night “unlimited bowling” promotion, the kitchen stops serving its Lao and Thai menu after 8 p.m.