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At Seattle Thai restaurants, even the basics are anything but, like Kin Len’s river prawn pad Thai.
Seattle’s Thai restaurant scene is hotter than sticky rice freshly unwrapped at the table, and somewhat less likely to burn your fingers. New openings bring hyper-specific sub-cuisines to the city as old-school spots cement their legacies; the papaya salads get spicier, the rice salads crispier. Whether you judge by the comfort in a bowl of rich coconut curry or only after toasting with a boozy chrysanthemum slushy, this list covers Seattle’s best Thai restaurants of all kinds.
Belltown
A rainbow of beams arch over the bar, plastic baskets in every color fashioned into chandeliers hang from the lofty ceiling, and then, at the entrance of this shotgun-shaped Belltown restaurant, a faux market stall serves as the host stand. The message: Get ready for bright, comforting street food favorites from Thailand. The vast menu takes cues from the popular Bangkok market for which it’s named—perfect roasted pork belly, sausages with serious spicy kick, deep-fried crab cakes, and a carousel of housemade hot sauces to crank up the heat. If the sheer number of dishes overwhelms (there are, delightfully, six papaya salad options alone), servers can steer you in the right chile-spiked direction.
Thai staples, like stewed beef Panang curry, have allowed Bai Tong to flourish into a restaurant empire.
Various
A Thai Airways employee opened Bai Tong near Sea-Tac in 1989 and created a place for homesick expats with hospitable servers in traditional silk garb and vivid dishes like fragrant meang kum lettuce wraps, stunning crispy garlic chicken, and a comforting banana-coconut milk kluay buat chee dessert. Since then, Bai Tong has expanded into a veritable empire, first moving to more destination-worthy digs near Southcenter, adding locations in Redmond and Issaquah, plus takeout locations in the U District and SLU. In 2017 the restaurants added a casual Pike/Pine sibling with its own street food menu, serving tender gems of mussel shrouded in crunchy layers of fried egg, plus a ton of standout pork belly. The group’s upscale restaurant, Noi, has locations downtown, in Green Lake, and in Bend, Oregon, and Honolulu.
West Seattle
Low light, vermilion walls, and wood filigrees that delicately evoke ancient Siam make this enduring West Seattle favorite one of the loveliest Thai restaurants around. But the crispy garlic chicken devotees—you know, the ones who order it for takeout three times a week—don’t need the place to be beautiful. They just need their fix: tender morsels of fried chicken, sautéed in garlic, fired with chiles, and served over crisped basil alongside jasmine rice.
The signature dumplings at E-Jae Pak Mor deserve all the hype, but so do familiar dishes like khao soi, beef noodle soup, and khao mun gai.
Chinatown–International District
The namesake dumplings at this Chinatown–International District shop hardly need any more hype after TikTok caught onto their silky-soft, gently rippled blue and white rice flour skins, bold pork filling, and herby dipping sauce. But they deserve all of it for the amount of skill and labor that goes into the specialty rarely seen outside Thailand. The rest of the menu lives up to that standard—including the polished version of khao soi. And co-owner Pum Yamamoto’s cheerful helpfulness as she clears tables and delivers food adds an extra dollop of sunshine in each bite, ensuring that the restaurant will live on well beyond its viral fame.
Phinney Ridge
After a decade in Old Ballard, one of the city’s most distinctive Thai restaurants settled into a more mellow existence in a converted Craftsman on Phinney Ridge. “Sweet’s not really what we do here,” says a server, before handing over a menu with entire sections dedicated to both grilled skewers and green papaya salad. Farther down the roster, hunks of pork belly fall apart in a restrained coating of five-spice curry, while tender cod and rice noodles arrive ready to wrap in lettuce leaves. Fu Kun Wu, the adjacent apothecary-style cocktail bar from the Ballard days, now occupies a little chamber by the entrance, and a patio shaded with Singha umbrellas and copious bamboo delivers a surprisingly sultry vibe on a busy stretch of Greenwood Ave.
Gao Lhao brings the excitement—and food—of Bangkok’s Chinatown to Green Lake.
Green Lake
Happy hour kicks off with boozy chrysanthemum or Thai tea slushies, hot plates sizzle to the table with steak and garlic butter rice, and the electric atmosphere continues throughout the night, fitting for a restaurant inspired by cofounder and chef Saravut Nawasangarun’s childhood visits to Bangkok’s Chinatown. The neon lights and murals of street vendors, the khaki vests the servers wear emblazoned with the restaurant’s name, the music; it all feels exciting. But it’s the food that cements it, particularly the dishes rarely seen around here: smoky pandan leaf–wrapped chicken with sweet soy sauce dip, crisp garlicky wild cod that look like adult fishy nuggets but taste like fine dining, and the surprising Chinese black olive green beans.
Ballard
In business since 1987, Thai Siam is an elder statesman of the Seattle restaurant scene. It serves a nostalgic version of Thai-American cuisine: crunchy-sweet mee-krob, classic pad Thai, and impressively spicy soups. Tragedy nearly struck in spring 2025, when the lease ran out on Thai Siam’s squat, unremarkable North Ballard building, but the community rallied around owner Nancy Bhokayasupatt, and she ended up buying the space. A fitting resolution for a restaurant that has always fervently supported its community in all sorts of ways, most notably with its annual free Christmas dinners.
Both the food and the vibes at Kin Len are energetic and colorful.
Fremont
A meandering series of elegantly dim spaces sets the expectation of chic neighborhood bar, while the creative and precise dishes insinuate that neighborhood could as easily be Song Wat as Fremont. The wide-ranging menu shows off the full extent of Thai cuisine with dishes like spicy octopus carpaccio, banana blossom fries, and durian tiramisu. The drinks follow suit, as in the Ying Yang Jar, with mezcal-infused coffee, Baileys, and sesame oil.
Ballard
It’s a restaurant sweet spot—lantern-lit and nice enough for casual Saturday nights, reasonable enough to feed the family without incurring a punishing bill. Most importantly, this little dining room on Ballard’s main drag preaches the pungent, spicy gospel of Thailand’s northeast Isan region, using high-quality proteins, like a nam tok meat salad made extra savory with boar collar, or deceptively fiery Thai sausages. Khao soi curry noodle soup: mandatory.
Larb’s hot pot and Northern Thai specialties aim to please the local Thai community.
Shoreline
In a world of sweet chili sauces boring enough to put a Muay Thai fight crowd to sleep, the one Larb serves alongside fried fish cakes lands a knockout punch, building heat with a slow burn, popping with peanuts and cucumber crunch. The grilled meat at Larb tastes like it belongs at rickety tables in Chiang Mai and the bubbling hot pot should be set out along the Mekong in Luang Prabang. The metal cups that keep the water cool and the walls of patterned dark wood paneling, as if in a traditional Thai house, complete the illusion.
Columbia City
Among the strip malls of Martin Luther King Jr. Way, a small Asian grocery store takes its name from the capital of Laos and serves dishes from the small nation whose flavors traverse its border with northeastern Thailand. Customers survey pictures of papaya salad and noodle soup on the screen menu overhead before ordering at the counter; most bypass the handful of tables and peruse the few aisles of sundries while waiting on takeout. More often than not, that includes nam khao, the crispy rice salad made with spicy sausage. Order extra sausage on the side for the full effect—on second thought, grab a few bags to go.
