Best Thai Restaurant? Spilled Milk #90

In honor of my discovery of a fantastic restaurant in NYC, here are the Thai places I love in the U.S.

I found a restaurant I love beyond measure. I can’t stop eating there. That’s the good news, but allow me to put it in context. Last week we talked some about BESTS. That’s a bad word. I am intentionally using it in the title above to make the point that it’s too relative a term. Best for who? When? Where? At what price? At what value proposition? I could go on and on.

So let’s level set a bit. I love Thai food; I obsess over it. When executed at a high level, it is so flavorful — contrast-laden (a hallmark of great cooking), clean, brightly acidic when needed, spicy in some cases, vegetal, craveable, fun, shareable — that I seek it out often.

I live in a town where all the best pure Thai cooking is good, but there’s nothing really great. More important, very few restaurants that cook Thai food in Minnesota (or elsewhere for that matter) remind me of some of my favorite restaurants in Thailand, and frankly that might be too tall an order. The light, the spatial design, etc., isn’t really replicable.

And then I went to…