Cooks from a pair of central Maine restaurants are hard at work, thousands of miles away. The goal? Make 1,200 orders of pad thai in just one hour.

Sourasay Senesombath and Anima Nikonthet run Asian Cafe in Winslow and Asian Noodle Bowl in Augusta. The pair and 10 of their staff are in Los Angeles, celebrating Thai New Year and attempting a new mark recognized by the Guinness World Records.

Of 38 restaurants participating in the attempt — most from the United States, but some international — Senesombath and Nikonthet’s team is the only one from Maine.

“It’s cool on our end, where we are able to help and support our community and make this happen and make it successful,” Nikonthet said. “It’s also helped my staff to open eyes as well. Because our family owned the restaurant for 30-plus years, but we are mainly focused in Maine, so we haven’t really seen outside of Maine.”

Los Angeles’ Thai Town is home to one of the biggest Thai New Year celebrations in the U.S. It’s an all-day street festival on Sunday that runs late into the night along Hollywood Boulevard.

For Senesombath and Nikonthet, it will be a chance to be surrounded by their own culture, after getting used to much smaller new year celebrations in central Maine. Senesombath is originally from Laos, which celebrates the same new year as Thailand, and Nikonthet is from Thailand.

But both have been putting down roots in central Maine’s restaurant industry for years. Senesombath has been here since he was a child, when his parents opened their first restaurant in Bar Harbor in 1989.

The Maine restaurant team is excited to try other pad thai — including from Thipsamai Padthai Pratoopee, a restaurant traveling in from Thailand — and contribute their own Maine-inspired style.

In Thailand, Nikonthet said, the main ingredient in pad thai is fish sauce. But when Senesombath’s family opened its restaurant, Mainers weren’t used to its strong, fishy odor. Not everybody liked it.

So Senesombath’s father got to work developing a new recipe using a special kind of soy sauce. This is not traditional, Nikonthet said, but it was authentic enough for Asian Cafe to be invited to this weekend’s festivities.

The world record attempt was invitation-based, and Nikonthet said experience and authenticity got the duo invited.

“They knew that if we join them, there’s a high chance, with our experience, that we can prepare 1,200 together in an hour,” Nikonthet said. “Obviously, if you have a rookie going in there, you cannot make it fast enough.”

All 30 invited restaurants will be working together to serve 1,200 orders of pad thai in an hour. There are standards they’ll have to meet — 20-ounce servings that judges will randomly weigh throughout the process — and time to get ready, as ingredient preparation begins at 10 a.m., two and a half hours before the official start to the competition.

Guinness World Records judges and independent witnesses will verify order numbers, and ingredients will be pre-portioned to maintain consistency. Senesombath and Nikonthet, who will compete on a team of six from both of their restaurants, aren’t worried.

They know what they’re doing, and said it’s an honor to represent Maine, which they said is not well-known, especially in the Thai community.

“We can try to put the spotlight on the state of Maine,” Senesombath said. “There’s some Thai communities up here.”

Traditionally, Thai New Year involves a massive water fight, which symbolizes cleansing, and it doesn’t hurt that Thailand is at its hottest in April.

But when Senesombath and Nikonthet gather with their community up in Maine, it’s a more relaxed gathering, focused on food and spending time together.

“We don’t want to make a mess,” Senesombath said. “So we don’t pour water on each other here. We just wish everybody happy new year and give each other hugs.”

Asian Cafe and Asian Noodle Bowl will both be closed until Tuesday, and will reopen Wednesday. Senesombath and Nikonthet said they will be ready to tell stories from the attempt at a record-breaking hour of making and serving pad thai.