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If you have gone out for Thai food in downtown Toronto in the last fifteen years, there is a good chance you have experienced Nuit Regular‘s cooking without knowing it. She is the highly sought-after chef behind Pai, Khao San Road, Kiin and Sukhothai. Together, those establishments account for a large share of what Toronto thinks of when asked where to go for good Thai food in our fair city.
That is truly unusual for cuisine options in one city alone, and it is the honest frame for a list like this. Four of the eight below come from one kitchen lineage. The other four don’t, and putting them side by side is more useful than pretending the city has eight unrelated Thai traditions. So the list is split into those two groups instead of ranked, and the second group is where you go once you’ve done the first.
The other thing worth saying up front? Northern Thai food is what made Toronto’s Thai food scene interesting. Khao soi, the coconut curry noodle soup from Chiang Mai, is on most of these menus and was on almost none of them twenty years ago. Before that, Thai food in Toronto largely meant pad thai and green curry (which, we love of course), calibrated for people who wanted neither to be difficult.
So the useful test at any of these is not the pad thai. It’s whether the kitchen will make you something it would serve at home.
The Nuit Regular restaurants
1. Pai Northern Thai Kitchen, Entertainment District
Down a staircase on Duncan Street, permanently full, and the restaurant most responsible for making northern Thai food the norm in Toronto.
Khao soi is the unquestionable order. The massaman beef and the yellow chicken curry are the ones people talk about days afterward. It’s loud, it’s a basement, and the wait at 7 pm on a Saturday is not a rumour. But it opens at 11:45 most days and lunch is a completely different, calmer dining experience. Word to the wise: on Monday, it doesn’t open until 4 pm.
The queue is the main complaint and it’s a fair one. Nothing about the room is designed for waiting, and there’s nowhere nearby to wait comfortably either.
Address: 18 Duncan St • Neighbourhood: Entertainment District • Price: $$ • Website
2. Khao San Road, Entertainment District
The one that started it. Khao San Road began in a basement on Adelaide and now sits on Charlotte Street in a room with real design. Strange trajectory for a restaurant whose whole appeal was that it felt like a street stall.
The food held up through the move. That’s not guaranteed when a basement restaurant gets a proper room. If you’re deciding between this and Pai, the split is roughly: Pai for the northern dishes and the noise, Khao San Road for a table you can talk across.
Charlotte Street is a short walk from Duncan Street, so if one has an hour’s wait the other is the obvious fallback and not a different plan.
Address: 11 Charlotte St • Neighbourhood: Entertainment District • Price: $$ • Website
3. Kiin, Entertainment District
The formal one, on Adelaide West, and the only Thai restaurant in the group that reads as an occasion. Michelin lists it. The cooking leans toward royal Thai dishes, which is a real historical cuisine and not a marketing frame. Court food: more delicate, more composed on the plate.
Two things to plan around. It’s closed Mondays and Tuesdays, and it’s dinner only, from 5pm. So the Wednesday-through-Sunday window is the whole of it. It sits well on our Toronto date night hit list if that’s the occasion.
Address: 326 Adelaide St W • Neighbourhood: Entertainment District • Price: $$$ • Website
4. Sukhothai, Corktown
The neighbourhood member of the family, now at 490 Front Street East. Traditional instead of northern-focused: pad thai, red curry, khao soi.
Check the address before you go. The old Parliament Street location is closed and it is still all over the internet, which sends people to a shut door with some regularity. Front Street East is the live one.
Address: 490 Front St E • Neighbourhood: Corktown • Price: $$ • Google Maps
Everyone Else That Matters
5. Salad King, Downtown
Forty-odd years of feeding Toronto Metropolitan University students, and the name is a joke that stopped being funny and became an institution. It is not a salad restaurant by any means.
The heat scale is the mechanism. You order by number; the numbers go higher than you think, and the kitchen takes you seriously. Newcomers should start well below where their ego suggests, and there is no prize for the top of the scale.
It’s also the cheapest sit-down meal on this list by a distance. That’s why it has fed students for four decades without needing to be fashionable. Two locations, Queen West and a second-floor room on Yonge, and both run on volume, not atmosphere.
Address: 224 Queen St W • Neighbourhood: Downtown • Price: $ • Website
6. Mengrai Thai, Corktown
Ontario Street, tucked into a residential pocket south of Queen East, and one of the few Thai kitchens downtown you can get into on short notice without it being a compromise.
Named for the king who founded Chiang Mai, a signal of the northern leaning. It’s the quietest room on this list and the one to remember when you want a conversation instead of a scene.
It’s also worth knowing that Corktown now has two of the eight on this list, Mengrai and Sukhothai, within about a ten-minute walk of each other. For a neighbourhood nobody thinks of as a Thai destination, that’s a better hit rate than most of downtown.
Address: 82 Ontario St • Neighbourhood: Corktown • Price: $$ • Google Maps
7. EAT BKK Thai Kitchen, Leslieville
Bangkok street food instead of northern, on Queen East, with two more locations up on Yonge in North York.
The east-end room is the useful one on this list, because everything else here is downtown or west and Leslieville is otherwise thin on Thai. Open 11am to 10pm on weekdays, a wider window than most, and one of the few places on this page you can eat at 3pm on a Tuesday without planning around it.
Address: 898 Queen St E • Neighbourhood: Leslieville • Price: $$ • Website
8. Jatujak, Scarborough
Victoria Park Avenue, named after the Bangkok weekend market, and the reason this list doesn’t stop at Yonge Street.
It’s the one entry here you’d make a trip for instead of stumbling into, and it draws a crowd that isn’t there for a downtown night out. More of what’s around it in our 17 Scarborough food spots.
Address: 1744 Victoria Park Ave • Neighbourhood: Scarborough • Price: $$ • Google Maps
Final Thoughts
Do the first four in order if you want to understand how Thai food in Toronto got the way it did, and treat that as a project, not a weekend. If you just want dinner tonight, the second group has the tables. And if you only take one thing from this: order the khao soi, wherever you end up. It is the dish that changed what Toronto expects from a Thai menu, and every kitchen on this list has an opinion about it. This is just a short list of course. TO has a multitude of Thai options. We would love to hear about your faves. Weigh in on our facebook page!
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