New York’s Thai Scene Has Never Been Better

At my first meal at Sukh in Fort Greene a few months ago, even with just two dishes in front of me, I quickly realized I was in a very good restaurant. Khao khai ra-bert, a dark-brown fritter of crispy and fluffy omelet topped with peppery, dry-fried beef over rice, was a feat of texture and spice, while a branzino was fried until the filet inside its golden shell was steamed, a canvas for a duo of sauces.

I was impressed, but I was not surprised: Excellent Thai restaurants — spots that promote regionally inspired menus filtered through individual chefs’ experiences and sensibilities — are becoming the norm in this city. Sappe, a groovy neon room with a jukebox in Chelsea, is the follow-up to hip East Village noodle bar Soothr and opened at the beginning of this year with salty, sweet, and frozen cocktails, grilled skewers, and a blood salad composed of minced beef, tripe, and liver tossed with spices, which the kitchen will serve raw at your request. Little Grenjai in Bed-Stuy is best known for their seasoned, porky Thai burger, which is served at lunch, but I savored the dark, tangy nam jim jaew served with grilled-steak salad. And braised-goat curry topped with a sprinkle of pomegranate seeds and two grilled, flaky flatbreads for dipping into the red gravy is reason enough to return to Chalong in Hell’s Kitchen, which focuses on Southern Thai.

It’s a significant leap from just over a decade ago, when Andy Ricker’s Portland import, Pok Pok, landed on the Columbia Waterfront and became the most famous Thai restaurant in a city that already had “nearly 300 restaurants run by Thais,” as Francis Lam reported for the Times in 2012. “Figuring out the customer can be a painful process if it involves orders being sent back and bottom lines taking a hit,” Lam wrote of the challenge that non-European restaurateurs faced while trying to serve authentic versions of their home countries’ cuisine: “It is notable (and more than a little curious) that the man expected to lead the city to the papaya-salad promised land is a white chef from the Pacific Northwest.” This, however, is no longer the case. After Pok Pok, a trickle of highly lauded, mostly Thai-run restaurants followed. Somtum Der, which originated as an Isaan street-food project in Bangkok, and Uncle Boons, from whose ashes rose Thai Diner, both opened in 2013. Ugly Baby set the new standard for “Thai spicy” when it opened in 2018. Zaab Zaab, which stole my heart with duck breast, liver, and fried skin larb ped udon at its original Elmhurst location in 2022, has since expanded to locations in Williamsburg, Chelsea, and a Flushing mall.

“A couple of years ago, khao soy was just being put on menus, and now it’s all over the place,” says chef Pongsathorn Thinnuch (via a translator), who opened Kraam in Nomad this past spring. There, the menu includes a version of the coconut curry soup made with confit chicken. My favorite dish is a salad of green-apple batons swimming in a salty tamarind dressing topped with fried softshell crab. It is based off of a version Thinnuch loves made with sour Thai mangoes, which get replaced with the sour apple. Another twist in the kitchen swaps wide rice noodles for fusilli in a drunken-noodle-inspired stir-fry. This, Thinnuch says, was a practical choice: “I don’t like when the noodle sticks.” He liked the way Italian pasta held up, and liked even more how the valleys of the corkscrew shape held on to the sauce.

Spaghetti also appears on the menu at Untable in Carroll Gardens — a nod to the historically Italian neighborhood, according to my server — either stir-fried with ground pork or in a seafood-heavy drunken-noodle riff. But start with crab croquettes, which contain little more than lump meat and enough binder to create perfect spheres that are fried and placed in threes on a scorching tom yum purée. Their khao soy comes as a dry dish, instead of the typical curry broth, with the rich, slightly sweet, brown sauce clinging to egg noodles. The best thing on the menu might be a smoky, sour basil consommé plated with seared Chilean sea bass, whose richness is cut by the tart soup.

Another great soup is the Tom Jiw at Pring in Chelsea, which hardly resembled any Thai dish I’d had before, with a clear, mild broth infused with herbs and swimming with small, tender cubes of pork. The recipe comes from the owner’s grandmother dating to 1932, and it was her cure-all remedy for any illness.

There is more: Tha Phraya has already become a favorite on its stretch of Second Avenue. I’m guessing that’s thanks in part to its Chiang-Mai sausage–stuffed spring rolls, which caused concern at my table when they were presented without any sauce but are juicy and spicy enough to stand on their own. Peeled segments of pomelo topped with a crunch topping of coconut, tiny dried fish, and raw onion were sharp and refreshing. “Crab fried-rice lava” entails a gooey, unflipped omelet, with crab throughout the soft egg layered over lightly fried rice. It reminded me of omurice.

The thing that ties these new restaurants together is a second wave of Thai-restaurant chefs starting to open restaurants of their own. Tha Phraya’s co-owner is a Soothr alum, while chef Aun Kampimarn at Untable was formerly at Somtum Der. The two chefs behind the menu at Sukh, Chanakan Promsuwan and Pattadon Rojanawit, met in Thailand and worked together in New York kitchens before setting up shop in Fort Greene, basing the theme of the restaurant on their shared love of train travel, which shows in the polished wood and cozy booths that give the feeling of being in a vintage car. But also the fried rice: colored red and served with crisp pork belly and Chinese broccoli, which re-creates the version they used to eat on trains in Thailand.