Thai restaurants began popping up all over San Francisco in the 1980s, and within a decade, Thai food had become a staple for first dates and Thursday-night takeouts. San Franciscan children eat almost as much pad Thai as they do organic baby carrots, and Thai restaurateurs have learned how to adapt their food to American tastes: sweeter, gentler, far lighter on the fish sauce and shrimp paste. But a few Thai restaurants are putting out gutsier, more nuanced fare, and exploring far beyond favorite American menu items like prik king and pad see euw.
Here are SFoodie's five favorite Thai restaurants in town:
5. Marnee Thai
Two locations: Irving and 23rd Ave., and Ninth Ave. and Lincoln.
The original, Irving Street location of Marnee Thai dates back to San Francisco's initial fascination with the cuisine, and American tastes have reshaped many of its dishes. But the basa with chili garlic sauce, the prawn and scallop yellow curry, and the hor mok (a steamed seafood custard, served on weekends) remain charismatically aromatic. The real draw of the cramped original location, whose walls are covered over in woven panels, is co-owner May Siriyarn, whose husband Chai is the chef. May is a sharp, boistress hostess who will boss you into ordering better than you'd planned. Get to know her well enough, and you may get a psychic reading with your sticky rice and mango.
4. Sai Jai Thai
Painted like the inside of a carnival tent in yellow and orange vertical stripes, Sai Jai Thai is the first of a trio of Tenderloin restaurants that have made Larkin Street a destination for Thai food. Some of the best dishes on its menu are the Northeastern ones -- a sweat-inducing papaya salad with pounded blue crab, a tart green-mango salad set on a cloud of crispy fried catfish (yum pla dook foo), and the grilled pork shoulder, so juicy it seems to have sucked in its marinade like a sponge, served either as a salad or over fried rice.
3. Chabaa
Located just one block down from Marnee, Chabaa is a pleasantly decorated place -- 100% date-worthy -- with a solid, standard Thai American menu. The sour orange curries, waterfall salads, and grilled pork neck with pungent jeaw (dipping sauce) on Chabaa's secret Thai menu (translated here) are another thing altogether. Chef Songla Sriprasom makes excellent Isaan (Northeast Thai) charcuterie, including a plump, tangy sai grok, a sticky-rice sausage that's fermented for a few days, then grilled and served with slivers of ginger, lime, and raw chiles. SFoodie hasn't tasted its like anywhere else in America.
Thai House Express can get a little chaotic, especially on nights when the AMC Van Ness up the street is packed, but the kitchen can also throw out out fervidly spiced Thai food that often achieves the ideal balance between hot, sour, sweet, and bitter. Again, salads are a highlight here, and the stir-fried noodles are among the best in town. The restaurant's duck larb -- roast meat chopped up and tossed with a fistful of herbs, onions, toasted rice powder, and lime -- is one of SFoodie's favorite dishes, as is the kao ka moo, a Chinese-Thai pork leg braised with five-spice powder until it's trembling with the urge to fall apart.
1. Lers Ros
No surprise here that Larkin Street's Lers Ros -- which is just about to open a second restaurant in Hayes Valley -- is SFoodie's favorite Thai restaurant in San Francisco. Chef-owner Tom Silargorn makes all his curry pastes in house, prepares venison and frog with the same skill he does pork and chicken, and makes few concessions to the American palate. His steamed sea bass with chile and lime is a masterful juxtaposition of silky and sharp. His pad phed dishes pulse with chiles and green peppercorns. And his crispy pork belly, coated in a sweet-hot glaze and tossed with basil leaves, is exactly the dish that you want at midnight after a show at the Hemlock Tavern and a few cocktails at the Lush Lounge.
