The Absolute Best Thai Restaurants in New York

Thai restaurants in New York are a dime a dozen, reliable workhorses scattered densely across every neighborhood, and most everyone has their go-to takeout spot: the one that delivers generally unobjectionable if unexceptional pad Thai and pineapple fried rice on the quick and cheap. It’s easy to mistake this mediocrity as defining Thailand’s cuisine. And so it can be genuinely life-changing to unlock the next level of the city’s Thai food: the more authentic, hyperregional, or at least bold, adventurous, and thrillingly palate-altering dishes offered by New York’s very best Thai restaurants.

 

The Absolute Best

 

1. Ayada Thai
77-08 Woodside Ave., Elmhurst; 718-424-0844

Thanks largely to the opening of Sripraphai (more on that below) some 20 years ago, Queens (and particularly the bordering Woodside and Elmhurst neighborhoods) has become the borough most associated with wonderful Thai restaurants, and in the current landscape Ayada takes the cake. The lengthy menu is full of absolute hits from all over the country: succulent frog’s legs, fried golden and draped in holy basil; salty minced pork, hiding rich quarters of black (preserved) eggs; a tantalizing tamarind-infused sour curry, bobbing with shrimp and fluffy cubes of omelette. One visit would be just scratching the surface of what’s on offer; returning many times could yield such a diversity of recipes and flavors that you might feel like you’d visited a different restaurant each time, were it not for the consistency of both the cooking and the atmosphere. The small dining room is polished and elegant without feeling too formal, the service exceptionally attentive and extremely pleasant. A meal at Ayada is an all-around slam dunk.

 

2. Thailand’s Center Point
63-19 39th Ave., Woodside; 718-651-6888

This cozy spot in Woodside is charmingly down-to-earth and homey, thanks to the chef and owner Annie Phinphattakul, who presides over both the dining room and the kitchen and employs her teenage children as waitstaff. The food, then, is even more impressive for its sharp perfection — she may be smiling warmly but she is also cooking fiercely: a mix of traditional, mostly northern dishes and her own witty, playful concoctions. Sections of the menu are labeled “Food to Die For” and “Something So Special” and the dishes within them tend to earn these distinctions. The “egg sandwich” — which turns out to be richly sauced, sticky chunks of stir-fried pork, scattered across one shatteringly crispy fried egg and topped with another, plus basil — is the sort of thing you might think about wistfully until you get to eat it again.

3. Sripraphai
64-13 39th Ave., Woodside; 718-899-9599

Since it opened in the mid-’90s, Sripraphai has set the standard for New York’s real-deal Thai restaurants, marking the Woodside-Elmhurst area as the definitive Mecca and serving as a difficult-to-pronounce (it’s the owner’s first name) calling card for anyone who wants to show off what an adventurous and authenticity-seeking eater they are. If you expect to be treated as someone who knows the least bit about Thai food, the only answer to “Have you been to Sripraphai?” is a resounding “Yes.” The many-paged menu, with dishes both familiar and unusual from all over the country, can be overwhelming, and so encourages repeat visits, each with its own rewards, from the coconut-milk-free, slow-burn jungle curry to the horizon-expanding crispy watercress salad (for which the green is battered and fried, topped with cashews and dried chiles) to piles of spicy fermented Isan sausage.

4. Kitchen 79
37-70 79th St., at Roosevelt Ave., Jackson Heights; 718-803-6227

If the food of Isan, Thailand’s largest and most northeastern region, has become well-represented in New York, we could use more from the south, where it tends to be very, very spicy, thrillingly and complexly so. Kitchen 79, on the border of Jackson Heights and Elmhurst and decorated a bit like a tidy, high-end nightclub (lots of black-and-white leather and glitzy light fixtures), is an excellent place to retrain your palate by familiarizing yourself with classics like gaeng tai pla — a deeply fishy, insanely fiery (not for everyone, but catnip for some) mackerel-based curry bobbing with curls of shrimp, tender cubes of pumpkin, and half-globes of barely crunchy Thai eggplant. Pad ped moo pah, which features wild boar sautéed in spicy curry paste with bamboo, basil, and sprigs of young peppercorn, is an antidote to pork-belly fatigue — it’s nearly as rich, but significantly meatier and bears a subtle gamy tang.

5. Pok Pok NY
117 Columbia St., at Kane St., Columbia Waterfront District; 718-923-9322

Andy Ricker, the chef behind the wildly popular, trendy Pok Pok restaurants (in New York, Portland, and Los Angeles), is not from Thailand, nor even of Thai descent, but his passion for his adopted homeland and its culinary offerings is truly obsessive: He’s ambassador/anthropologist/ historian-as-chef, and his carefully organized, thoroughly detailed menu makes his enthusiasm infectious. Eating at Pok Pok is like taking a culinary tour of the country and even dipping into the cuisines of its neighbors, from the Vietnamese-style (and now-iconic) fish-sauce wings, to the curry with pork belly and pork shoulder (a Chiang Mai classic with Burmese roots) and the Chinese-influenced clay-pot prawns with glass noodles. Most everything is spectacularly delicious, especially washed down with drinking vinegars, Ricker’s take on shrubs, in flavors from tamarind to Thai basil. And even the water will teach you something: As is often done in northern Thailand, it’s infused with pandanus leaf to taste of toasted rice and vanilla.

6. Uncle Boons
7 Spring St., nr. Elizabeth St.; 646-370-6650

Ann Redding and Matt Danzer, the married chefs behind Uncle Boons, seem to have a goal similar to Andy Ricker’s: to transform the way the average American (or at least New York) diner thinks about Thai food, as not just an interesting, exotic “ethnic” option but in fact one of the great cuisines of the world, on par with French or Italian. Their restaurant is as buzzy and stylish as any other in Nolita, and though they hew carefully to tradition when it comes to each dish, they follow their whims in terms of the wide array of them, inspired by their travels all across the country, and place a premium on using the highest quality ingredients. When betel leaves are available, it’d be nothing short of a mistake to skip them, wrapped around a heady mixture of fresh ginger, coconut, dried shrimp, and shrimp paste, plus peanuts and chiles. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a better khao soy, the northern-style, coconut-based, whole-chicken-leg curry, made golden with fresh turmeric and featuring homemade egg noodles.

Honorable Mentions