I’ve tried so many Thai places since moving from NY/NJ and can’t find a place that doesn’t have bell peppers in their green curry while having Thai eggplant.
Does such a place exist? I have German Riesling at home but can’t pair it with what’s available here.
I’m looking for Thai food that tastes like how it is in Thailand.
Thanking you in advance!
Not sure about “authenticity” but all my Thai friends (they are from Bangkok) whenever they are around, they like to go to Pai and eatBKK …
Agree with cakumadesu. Look up the owners of Pai and eatBKK and you’ll see both families operate a bunch of Thai restaurants under different names (e.g. eatBKK is under Jatujak). Their base sauces are as authentic as you can get in Toronto (with their higher end restaurants offering more complexity). Bell peppers are unfortunately what you have to work with here since they’re available from greenhouses all year round without having the pay more for imported ingredients (diners vote with their wallets). If you’re willing to pay more for imported, try something like Kiin (same owners as Pai).
It’s unfortunate the two owners are the only ones that has a say as to what true Thai food is like around here.
Yes, diners vote with their money but that only works when there is competition with the real deal. This used to be the same case in NYC until word got out that Sripraphai, further out far in the middle of queens, had amazing (see: authentic) Thai food. They’ve since expanded and have multiple locations cause diners finally had something real to vote for. A lot of Thai places in the rest of NYC changed after that and the overall understanding of the food in the city benefited as a result.
I’m hoping there’s a mom and pop shop that refuses to bend and show pride in their food that they’d want to share with the GTA. Those are the spots I am interested in And would gladly support. I appreciate the recommendation for Kiin but that doesn’t fit the bill for me (my fault for not being clear on authentic).
Having said that, I do know of just one place out in Oakville (Thai Siam Cuisine) that doesn’t use bell peppers (first thing I asked the owner). Funny enough the manager there used to work at a Houston location (ton of great authentic Asian food across the Asian continent in Houston) and understood exactly what I meant. Unfortunately it’s a chain from Thailand and just lacks somewhat the complexity I’m looking for. Sadly, it’s a reoccurring theme I noticed with all Asian food (with the exception of Cantonese/Indian/Pakistani). I’m hoping to find another that is better. Although it’s very reasonably priced at Thai Siam Cuisine, I’d gladly pay for more for better (not fancier).
You are right. We vote with our dollars. If we demand better, much like in other parts that didn’t used to have it but now flush with choices, and vote with our dollars for food that represents better of what they claim, they will deliver (happily). And no, it doesn’t have to be expensive. There isn’t a lot of Thai folks in NYC. Everyone prior to Sripraphai blowing up was serving the same food we see here today. Sripraphai was offering cheaper by being at a remote location (lower rent - NYC is still far more expensive). As paying customers, we need to demand better. Otherwise, we’re left with watered down food that leaves many wanting despite the high prices paid (see: rip off).
I will definitely try the two.
Thank you very much for the suggestion!
What exactly does ‘most authentic’ mean? Is there a degree of authenticity? Many Thai restaurants in Toronto are Thai owned and they cook as they do at home in Thailand, so that that makes them authentic?
Pai and all it’s sister restaurants are probably most well known. Chef Nuit is from Thailand and she and her husband Jeff are great at doing marketing and they have expanded their brand. Our go to Thai place is Mengrai Thai which doesn’t do marketing as well (though husband Allan definitely tries!). Chef Sasi is from Chiang Rai and she and Allan also have a restaurant in Chiang Mai and they have a resort in Wiang Pa Pao called Treetop Country. That’s pretty authentic! 
My favourite places are:
Nana (their fried chicken larb, their street-style pad thai, their curries)
Pai (usually pad kra pao, but I haven’t been lately)
I want to try Issan Der
Favourites Thai BBQ for modern Thai BBQ (excellent BBQed Oysters)
New modern Laotian: Lao Lao Bar https://laolaobar.com
EatBKK: pad kra pao tasted good but I experienced hives afterwards so I haven’t been back. I get hives from some restaurants, and don’t return when that happens.
Can you ask the restaurant to omit the bell peppers?
Unfortunately I haven’t tried Sripraphai yet. However, if you’re familiar with the nuances of Thai cuisine, you’ll be able to identify one of those families has a more northern Thai palate and the other more southern focused. In that sense, they are actually quite different in their approaches to what “Thai food is like” as you say.
The willingness of chefs refusing to bend their pride is generally a bad business decision in this part of the world. I prefer chefs who incorporate the freshest obtainable ingredients and so I don’t mind bell peppers if water spinach is not in season (and mind you, it’s twice the price). As another example, we don’t have young bamboo here, but baby corn serves as a good substitute. Let’s be honest, majority of the diners in our hemisphere don’t know what true Thai cuisine is like. I was at Smorgasburg last summer which was curated by a top food writer and his Thai choice was an absolute failure. The pad kra pow was missing the namesake ingredient… yes, absolutely no holy basil in the stir fry.
But to appease the local tastes, you have to adapt. For example, almost no Vietnamese restaurants in Toronto serves bun rieu with the traditional fermented shrimp paste condiment. When I took one of my chef friends to a place that offered that, he remarked it was so stinky that he could smell it two tables away. And just to illustrate my point, that is a very low traffic restaurant that won’t get on Toronto’s “best Vietnamese restaurants” list. But it was as authentic as you can get in Toronto.
More chefs are getting local growers to plant the vegetables they need for their “authentic” dishes, but the growing seasons for those vegetables do not make themselves available year round as they are in the tropics.
Thanks for your heads up on Thai Siam Cuisine. I’ll check it out soon.
Laotian cuisine here? I NEED to try that. I wonder if they tone down the spice. Lao cuisine is IMHO hands down the spiciest in Southeast Asia.
Regarding your hives, you might want to consider getting one of those grid skin poke test by an allergist. Or if it’s just a minor inconvenience then just ignore my suggestion.
I’ve had the allergy tests. No allergies to foods. I’m likely sensitive to some preservatives, and there are no lab tests that confirm sensitivities to salts, nitrates and sulphites.
I write down where and when it happens (Terroni, EatBKK, at my last tasting menu at long gone Splendido 
, and so on).
I don’t go by top writers or celebrity chefs. They often have an agenda.
Yes, most people in this hemisphere don’t know but there are certainly several cities where there is enough who do where real places can expand (I have lived all over the US and now in Toronto).
I gave Sripraphai as an example of how it can bring success (dollars). Unfortunately, as they’ve expanded, they had to tweak things to be somewhat less authentic (see: not as complex) and the menu is now half of what it used to be. They also now take credit cards and prices have jumped (before the pandemic). Still, given their challenges from growing, they still try their best to bring real food.
I have spoken with owners who refuse to grow and don’t want a lot of folks knowing about their place cause they don’t want to shrink their menu and reduce quality. They say they are busy enough where they don’t care. It all depends on what the restaurants mission statement is. Not all of them are about trying to squeeze as much margins/profit from their business. These small mom and pop restaurants, although very few in number, do exist. I personally prefer places like these. It’s precisely because it’s been very hard to find them, I’ve asked here to see if anyone knows. I’ve seen a couple mentions here that i would love to go check out. My list of places to try has expanded and for that, I am thankful and still hold hope something somewhere is out there.
Also, would you mind letting me know which Vietnamese people were running away from? I’d like to run directly to it sometime soon if they are still doing it. =)
Thanks again!
Figured I’d address the question of what i mean by authenticity:
It’s simply whether or not the dish would resonate with folks from the country the restaurant claims it represents.
To illustrate the point with questions:
-is spaghetti with meatballs as we know it here Italian?
-is the hamburger German (or Mongolian if you want to take it further)?
-is ketchup Chinese?
-is the chicken parm sandwich Italian? Is the Philly cheesesteak?
-is the Alaskan roll Japanese? Sushi burrito? Sushi pizza? Dragon rolls?
-is the general’s chicken Chinese?
These are all American food. It was made in North America to sell to North Americans. They don’t exist in those countries as their food. People from those countries don’t claim it as theirs. In fact, almost every Italian from Italy hates every Italian restaurant in NYC except for 1 or 2 (they used to only go to Keste but Ribalta has also become popular).
If it resonates more with people outside that country, it belongs to the place it was first made.
So when i ask the question most authentic, i mean places where if you gave it to most people from that country, they’d be willing to pay and have it on a regular basis or if they’d accept eating it there without issue and consider it their food. Another way to do it, although this is my sub-preference, if you presented the dish to someone’s grandmother living in that country, would an eyebrow get raised?
Separate point I’d like to make about reviews, articles, celebrity chefs, etc talking about authenticity. They say these things knowing there is very slim margins for restaurants if they all focused on authentic food. They don’t want that. They’d rather charge higher margins for their “take” on the food. The side effects turn out to be that the food gets misrepresented as being what folks from those countries actually eat. Up until 7 years ago, being an American kid, i whole heartedly believed the olive garden was serving Italian food. I thought every Chinese take out place was serving real Chinese food. I thought Thai food wasn’t spicy and bland, and that bell peppers were typical in green curry. I thought taco bell was real Mexican food (until i lived in Houston and realized there’s tex mex and then there’s regional Mexican food).
I’ve also lived overseas in South Korea as a kid. I was frustrated that they were offering American food that wasn’t close to anything i had known in the US. Got my hopes up. Never satisfied. Still home sick for food i grew up on. Not surprisingly, they charged more for being “different”. Ever try Korean pizza? It’s sweet. Signature is sweet corn on it. Cheese doesn’t taste right. It’s awful. But its popular. I don’t want that. Other Americans who visit laugh at that food and rightfully so. So, if we don’t view that as real there, what are we doing here? With the higher margins, they could potentially make it the right way (best they can) and still charge the same (maybe even slightly more). I’d rather they spend less on location, ambiance, etc, and more on the ingredients. As a constantly packed restaurant far from Manhattan located directly under the subway tracks shows, it can be done (AND be profitable).
I want to experience the food as best as it can be represented.
Suggestion about asking to take out the bell peppers at these restaurants. I guess the point about bell peppers in green curry was that it shows which direction that owner is leaning towards. It tells me there are other things that would fall short. 9 out of 10 times, i left wishing i hadn’t spent money there. I’d rather someone try giving me the real the best they can given the circumstances. I would much rather support those restaurants. That’s my ask when I’m looking for “authentic”.
Hope this clarifies my perspective and request.
For me, with ethnic or regional foods, there are two aspects to wade through:
Reason for the two is because they all present themselves as food from that country/region when most of it is local food. It could still be very good food. It just makes it very hard to find what I’m looking for. They really should distinguish between them. Isn’t it odd that with all of these Korean restaurants, Koreans from Korea living here would rather eat from home cause none are up to standards? Do we really have diverse food? Or is it all just local?
To say authenticity doesn’t matter when representing that countries food is borderline disrespectful to that culture. It matters for those ex pats. It matters to those who’ve traveled there and miss the food. It matters when someone makes a judgement call about someone’s cuisine when they have a completely skewed version of it. It also makes classic wine pairings difficult to find. To this day i make cheese steaks at home cause no place outside Philly (now a few places in NYC with sister restaurants from Philly spots) makes a real Philly cheese steak… It’s just terrible elsewhere. Somehow either too dry, too wet, or too busy with ingredients…
From those standards, I’m looking forward to try:
-Mengrai Thai
-Nana
-Pai (obligatory as its stated in multiple places that this is the best?)
If there are any more recommendations, would love to hear more. Even years later.
Thank you very much!!
Edit: apologies for anyone who read this before my corrections to an overzealous “autocorrect”. Likely didn’t make sense. Swipe keyboards are fast but too many odd changes as i type (it goes back and changes words incorrectly depending on what’s typed after)
Another nail in the coffin of food authenticity
Authentic restaurants that tastes like where it claims to be from
I believe I’ve addressed all those points (along with their motivation) in that article in my write up in this thread.
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I have Pai a shot today. Even asked to have the bell peppers left out and they said they would. Severely disappointed. The watered down Sripraphai today is waaay better than this… Absolutely no spice on the curry. Very little, if any complexity. Did they use the curry paste from a can? That’s what it tastes like. It’s mostly chicken and bell peppers… Even the masaman curry lacked any real flavor… Never again… Curry i make at home is better using this recipe…
Wish i could get my money back it was so bad… Tastes more like coconut milk than curry!
They can most DEFINITELY do better at these prices!!
I haven’t been to Pai in 4 or 5 years.
Chef Nuit is one of the better Thai chefs in the city, and she used to make the curry pastes from scratch. I don’t think Pai would be using paste, but who knows?
Kiin is the higher end restaurant that Chef Nuit is involved with.
https://www.kiintoronto.com/
If you try Pai, Kiin, Mengrai, Nana, Issan Der, Eat BKK, etc and don’t like any of them, maybe save the Thai for trips to other cities.
Mengrai was quite popular with some Chowhounds a decade ago. I haven’t been.
Dobber links to most of the places mentioned so far, as well as a few places that might not have been mentioned, such as Sala , Maya Bay and Koh Lipe.
Definitely tasted like paste. Not sure if off night or if went down hill. I had high hopes as Thai Siam Cuisine in Oakville with cheaper pricing, spice (need to ask and let them know you can handle and that you won’t call back saying it’s inedible from being too spicy. lol), and complexity, was my baseline. The one in oakville I’ve tried was several times better than Pai despite not being as complex as what I’m used to, but was at least a good start. Will still try the two places mentioned out of what was mentioned here but this is why i refuse to go to places that serve bell peppers in their curry. 9 out of 10 times, it’s an omen
That’s too bad!
I went through a Pad Thai phase that lasted for about 10 years, followed by a green curry and red curry phase that lasted about 10 years, then, followed by a khao soi phase that ended a few years ago.
These days, I mostly order panang curry if I see it offered, or pad kra pow. I try dishes that are new to me, as well.
I make red curry at home, so I don’t order it at Thai restaurants anymore. I can’t really help in terms of comparing recent restaurant versions.
