Take your pick of these communal feasts, tasting menus and speedy venues for solo bowls of crab curry.
From hot-and-sour Southern-style curries to bone-warming bowls of boat noodle soup, Sydney’s range of Thai food just keeps getting better and better. “Thai Town”, especially, is flourishing in the CBD just to the west of Central Station, and deserves a full guide of its own (we’re working on it!). Meanwhile, here are eight favourites from the Good Food Guide that make Sydney one of the best cities for Thai food outside of Thailand.
Porkfat
At this warm, family-run diner on the border of Chinatown, owner-chef Narin “Jack” Kulasai uses pork fat where other kitchens use standard cooking oil, and the flavours are more complex, rounded and rave-worthy as a result. Baked prawns are pretty much mandatory, the meaty electric-orange tigers roasted with vermicelli and oyster sauce, and sporting little jewels of crisp-fried fat. Bring your own pinot for grilled pork jowl powered by smoked chili nam jim, and bring a group to load the table with tamarind and soy sticky beef skewers.
33 Ultimo Road, Haymarket, porkfat.com.au
Caysorn
Located in a sleepy commercial complex, Caysorn is all about southern Thai cooking with sweat-inducing spice levels and bold, sour flavours. Kanom jeen (fermented rice noodles) is available in six different variations including nam ya, a hot curry, flecked with fresh crab, and the noodles do a bang-up job absorbing all the coconut goodness. Spicy curry with grilled fish, cashews and salted fish intestines is a force to be reckoned with, even for the most die-hard chilli lovers.
Shop 106-108A, 8 Quay Street, Haymarket, caysorn.com.au
Viand
Owner-chef Annita Potter welcomes diners to Viand’s ochre-red dining room like friends at a dinner party, before pivoting to the proud central kitchen. There’s nowhere to hide, but chefs are the epitome of calm, in one turn serving you sticky rice, in the next, prepping fiery dry-roasted chillies for the next pound, paste or broth. Tasting menus bounce from fat to crunch, sour to sweet, subtle to kapow.
41 Crown Street, Woolloomooloo, viand.club
Khao Man Gai
Few meals offer better value in Haymarket than the chicken rice set at this brightly lit newcomer at the top end of George Street. $19.90 buys a juicy white portion of Hainan-style thigh, crunchy-fried chook (or a choice of grilled chicken or pork jowl), garlic rice and three little bowls of ginger, soy and chilli sauces. Don’t sleep on the punchy som tum with pla ra (fermented fish sauce) either.
804 George Street, Haymarket
Spice I Am
Always packed and trilling with the sound of workhorse woks, this two-decade-old institution doesn’t shirk on heat, flavour, ingredients or buzz. You will queue. You will squeeze onto seats. But efficient staff and short cooking times reward the wait as signature dishes such as gang som cha-om goong – a brothy tamarind-rich sour and spicy curry piled with fat, chilli-flecked prawns – arrive.
90 Wentworth Avenue, Surry Hills, spiceiam.com
Chat Thai
The Chat Thai restaurants helmed by Palisa Anderson have a well-established reputation for flavour and consistency at multiple venues. The Chatswood outpost is complete with its own charming outdoor spaces where families get their fix of spring rolls stuffed with blue swimmer crab and the famous “Amy’s Noodles”, named after Chat Thai’s late, great founder, Amy Chanta. The yellow crab curry, meanwhile, is thrillingly hot.
Shop 12, Chatswood Place, 260 Victoria Avenue, Chatswood, chatthai.com, (also at Neutral Bay, The Galeries, Circular Quay and Westfield Sydney)
Joe’s Table
For Joe Kitsana, hospitality is personal. He takes your booking on his own phone, does the shopping, chopping and cooking himself, and brings your dishes to the table. Kitsana’s food triggers nostalgia for those who reminisce about suburban Thai in their youth: crunchy spring rolls of chicken and black fungus, red curry of barbecue duck with apple eggplant and snake beans, and a six-hour caramelised beef rib with pickled mustard greens and chilli.
1/185A Bourke Street, Darlinghurst, joestable.com.au
Song Fang Khong
Isan Thai and Lao dishes are the focus of this modest eatery with tanned tiles and vinyl chairs near Fairfield Station. Lao food is similar, but more bitter and pungent, than Thai cuisine, and nearly every table orders the raw beef salad (served with fresh herbs and grounded roasted rice), savoury and zesty before hitting you with a big wallop of spice. Raw prawn salad keeps the acid and umami humming, and thick-cut barbecued ox tongue is a must-order.
7 Anzac Avenue, Fairfield
Restaurant reviews, news and the hottest openings served to your inbox.
Callan Boys is Good Food’s national eating out and restaurant editor.
