At Taste of Thai Town you can eat khao kha mu in what was once a holding cell. You can slurp tom kha gai in booking. And you can spoon up green curry and rice in a basement that once might’ve been reserved for cattle prodding and water boarding. Arun Sampanthavivat’s long-awaited second restaurant is a strange but karmically satisfying repurposing of the old Albany Park police station. Some two years in the making, it was billed as sort of a community center for Thai culture and an Eataly for Thai cuisine. So far much of that vision remains unrealized, but the restaurant is in full swing.
While there are some examples of culinary miscegenation (banh mi, shumai), the menu hews to a very familiar format. You have the same noodle dishes (pad thai, pad see ew, pad woon sen), the same salads (nam tok, som tam, yum woon sen), and the same appetizers (crab Rangoon, tod mun) you find all over the place, with occasional cosmetic flourishes to recall the fine-dining pedigree of the chef responsible.
Indeed, if the esteemed chef gave higher billing to uncommon dishes such as these instead of pandering with tame renditions of familiar standards, he might have a restaurant worth seeking out—one that could have capitalized on his renown to introduce great numbers of eaters to the true pleasures of soulful Thai food. But for the moment, Taste of Thai Town isn’t the face of Thai cuisine in Chicago its founder envisioned. v
4461 N. Pulaski 773-299-788tasteofthaitown.com
