(Travel + Leisure) - If you’ve eaten at a neighborhood Thai restaurant, you’re likely familiar with pick-your-protein Technicolor curries. Odds are you’ve tried papaya salad, spring rolls, and pad thai improbably made with ketchup and maybe even peanut butter.

While many ethnic cuisines are domesticated to Western palates, Thai food may be the most bastardized in America. “We have the same basic Thai dishes over and over again, many of which have nothing to do with Thailand,” says Andy Ricker, the James Beard Award–winning chef behind the bicoastal restaurant empire Pok Pok, known for authentic dishes like charcoal-roasted hen with lemongrass and tamarind.

But for as many sugarcoated Thai restaurants operating in the U.S., there’s an appreciable number of spots doing it right—especially in immigrant-heavy cities like Houston, where Asia Market encourages diners to personally adjust their dishes with condiments like pickled peppers, fish sauce, and chili sauce (nam prik). L.A., meanwhile, supports both NIGHT + MARKET, which puts a hipster spin on Thai street food, and Thai Town’s Jitlada, where chef Tui Sungkamee makes traditional fiery southern dishes.

“Thai is not a monolithic culture and, as such, not a monolithic cuisine,” explains Ricker. “It varies vastly from region to region and even from house to house.”

If a restaurant’s focus is northern, expect vegetables, bitterness, and earthy, oily flavors like coconut curry (khao soi), along with heaps of sticky rice. Northeastern (or Isan) tends to be tarter and spicier; order the larb (a spicy minced meat salad) and fermented sausages. Southern Thai is all about pungent, bold curries spiked with turmeric, while central prioritizes balance, best exemplified by traditional pad thai, made with tamarind, lime juice, dried shrimp, and salted turnip or radish—never ketchup or peanut butter, swaps made to satisfy America’s penchant for sugar.

“Thai food is one of the most balanced cuisines,” adds chef Haidar Karoum, who spends hours making curry paste from scratch at Doi Moi in Washington, D.C. “It’s never just sweet or just spicy, rather a balance of acidity, sweetness, aromatics, and heat.”

Read on for more restaurants striking that perfect Thai balance.

Lers Ros: San Francisco, California
Thai-born chef-owner Tom Silargorn is taking over San Francisco one neighborhood at a time. His encyclopedic menu—featuring more than 120 dishes, nearly all under $10—has three homes throughout the city, in the Tenderloin, Hayes Valley, and the Mission, all of which offer diners a taste of Thailand that’s normally camouflaged from greenhorns in Thai-only menus. Expect modern, contemporary interiors and rambunctious diners whose chatter is nearly as loud as the flavors in duck larb, whole crispy whitefish with blazing chiles, and pad kra prow moo krob (stir-fried pork belly with potent basil and sweet pepper). We’re jealous that locals can get Silargorn’s authentic, ketchup-free pad thai for delivery too.

Khong River House: Miami, Florida
Named for the culturally binding Mekong River, James Beard Foundation semifinalistKhong River House pays homage to several Southeast Asian countries. But we’re partial to its northern Thai plates like peppery green papaya salad and crispy duck with green peppercorn and jalapeño garlic chives—served, naturally, with sticky rice. Credit goes to chef Piyarat Potha Arreeratn, a native of Chiang Rai. Meals unfold in an inspired setting of reclaimed wood, Thai motorcycle license plates, birdcages, fish traps, and chairs made from fishing boats. Even the bar, which stocks 70 varieties of gin, embraces fiery chiles, steeping them in cocktails.

Ayada: Queens, New York
Considering Ayada’s location in the heart of the Queens Thai community, near a Thai Buddhist temple, it’s not surprising the restaurant is known for its take-no-prisoners spice level. Phichit-born chef-owner Duangjai Thammasat (nicknamed Kitty) never sugarcoats her food; rather, her menu showcases Thailand in all its sinus-clearing glory, with an emphasis on southern curries spiked with sour tamarind and hot chiles. Don’t leave without trying the soupy kaeng som curry soured with tamarind paste or the beef tendon soup—you’ll want to order it dark, meaning laced with pig’s blood, a prized ingredient in southern Thailand. Temper the heat with cooling young-coconut water and ice cream infused with iced tea syrup. 77-08 Woodside Ave.


Lotus of Siam: Las Vegas, Nevada
The late culinary bible Gourmet magazine put this off-strip treasure on the map more than a decade ago when it named Lotus of Siam the best Thai restaurant in America. Since then, chef-owner Saipin Chutima, who runs the restaurant with her husband and daughters, became the first Asian-born chef to win a James Beard Award for cooking the cuisine from her roots: Chiang Mai–style family recipes passed down from multiple generations. Diners wait hours for a table, vying for a taste of Chutima’s nam kao tod(a salad of crispy rice, fried peanuts, and sour sausage), nam prik nuhm (roasted green-chile dip), and catfish larb. Riesling pairs brilliantly with spicy food, which here is rated by degrees of hotness, and there’s an extensive list of German white wines to complement the 150-plus dishes—not to mention the steal-of-the-century $9.99 buffet lunch.

Doi Moi: Washington, D.C.
Chef Haidar Karoum and restaurateur Mark Kuller (the duo behind Proof and Estadio) always planned to open an Asian restaurant together. After heading east to eat their way through Bangkok and Chiang Mai in 2012, they returned to D.C., where Doi Moi(meaning “new change”) was born. The 5,000-square-foot restaurant overlooks bustling 14th Street and features a large open kitchen paying tribute to the culinary traditions found throughout Southeast Asia—and its Thai dishes are among D.C.’s finest. You’ll agree if you order the khao soi gai, a spicy chicken and crispy noodle coconut curry with pickled mustard greens that takes three hours to make.

Asia Market: Houston, Texas
This ethnic grocery’s teeny kitchen specializes in palate-awakening heat. Choose among five spice levels (from “mild” to “1,000 peppers”), and make any necessary adjustments at the table stocked with fiery condiments. The choices here include bowls of kee mao (rice noodles spiked with basil, cherry tomatoes, and chili sauce); preserved duck egg curry; and shredded papaya salad with crab, made Thai style (sweet and sour with peanuts, dried shrimp, and cherry tomatoes) or Laos style (meaning with galvanic bursts of southern Thai fish sauce). Most dishes ring in under $8, making Asia Market’s homespun setting all the more satisfying.

Ruan Thai: Wheaton, Maryland
Family-owned Ruan Thai has been a local favorite since 1998, and for good reason: its intricate symphonies of sweet, sour, salt, and scorch are unparalleled in Maryland. Chef Krisana Suchotinunt’s yum watercress salad is the talk of the town—deep-fried greens comingle with shrimp, squid, onions, and cashews—though a curry of catfish, green beans, and cauliflower is equally intriguing. With only 12 tables and a purported parking issue, Ruan Thai is not easy to get to. But if you do, be sure to order the deep-fried whole flounder with hot chile garlic sauce.

Pok Pok: Portland, Oregon
People flock to Pok Pok for the legendary chicken wings: they’re deep fried, smothered in sticky fish sauce, and make up more than 30 percent of the restaurant’s sales. But they stay for the coriander-rubbed grilled boar collar—and the whiskey. James Beard Award–winning chef Andy Ricker may be a 6-foot-2 white dude from Oregon, but his ever-expanding empire (seven restaurants in Portland and New York at last count) and fluency in Thai suggest his food holds its own with the Siamese. The original Pok Pok started as a bare-bones shack with a single-digit menu. Today, the expanded restaurant emphasizes northern and northeastern Thai street food, complete with an arsenal of Chiang Mai sausage, fiery buffalo larb, spicy green papaya salad, and coconut curry grilled corn.

Jitlada: Los Angeles, California
Follow Ryan Gosling’s footsteps to Jitlada, where the actor is a regular. Indeed, this family-run southern Thai temple has won over much of L.A., luring diners to a mini-mall in the Thai Town neighborhood, an unassuming location offset by the nuclear dishes you’d be hard-pressed to find outside Hat Yai. Expect a wait—with only three stoves and 50 seats, there’s almost always a line, though that doesn’t stop chef Tui Sungkamee’s menu from spanning some 300 dishes, including coconut mango salad, a curative tom yum soup (a lemongrass-laced broth with chiles and Kaffir lime), fiery Phangga jungle curry, and eel with stinky beans. He spends hours at local farmers’ markets personally selecting the night’s ingredients, while his sister Jazz—Jitlada’s infectious co-owner and host—grows herbs like galangal and turmeric in her home garden. If you’re lucky, Jazz will be persuaded to make her off-menu Thai burger.

NIGHT + MARKET: Los Angeles, California
Don’t be thrown off by the psychedelic setting or the Cindy Crawford poster, which is reminiscent of roadside shacks in the Thai countryside. The indigenous Thai street food Kris Yenbamroong is cooking up at both the new Silver Lake outpost and the original West Hollywood NIGHT + MARKET is everything we’ve come to love about north and northeastern Thai food—pungent, bold flavors and gobs of heat smacking you in the face. The best approach: bring friends and share lots of small plates. Start with luu suk, a “dipping soup” of pork blood and MSG topped with fresh herbs and pork cracklings, and spicy catfish larb before digging into the pork toro (75 percent of which is fat) and curries, alongside generous helpings of sticky rice. To tame the fire, order a bottle of pét-nat, a natural sparkling wine. Close your eyes and taste—you could easily be in Chiang Rai.

Get the rest of the list at Travel + Leisure: Best Thai Restaurants in the U.S.

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Previously:
A tuk-tuk tour of Chiang Mai's cuisine