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    Thai street food
    Photograph: Shutterstock / worradirek | Thai street food
    Photograph: Shutterstock / worradirek

    The 11 best Thai restaurants in Vancouver

    From fiery Isaan cooking and Bangkok street-food classics, these are Vancouver’s essential Thai restaurants

    Written by Isa Tousignant
    Editor, Time Out
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    Thai food in Vancouver is having a moment, although anyone who has been paying attention knows the groundwork was laid years ago. The city now has everything from ambitious restaurants playing with pristine B.C. seafood to tiny spots making curry paste from scratch, old-school institutions, regional specialists and bowls of noodles worth crossing the city for.

    The common denominator? Big flavour. Expect chilies, lime, tamarind, fish sauce, toasted rice, fresh herbs, coconut and smoke deployed with nuance.

    These are the 11 Vancouver Thai restaurants you’ll want to try.

    Time Out Market Vancouver

    Best Thai restaurants in Vancouver

    Song (by Kin Kao)

    If you’re looking for Thai food that feels like a proper night out, start here. Song takes familiar flavours and pushes them somewhere more exciting, while keeping the whole experience fun rather than precious. The current menu jumps from Fanny Bay oysters with nam jim seafood sauce to Hokkaido scallop salad, grilled pork jowl and a magnificent whole fried barramundi. The beef green curry goes deep with slow-cooked shank, Thai eggplant and finger root, while the pomelo salad remains compulsively fresh and crunchy. Even the cocktails riff on tom yum, toasted rice and Thai tea. No wonder it took gold in Vancouver Magazine’s 2026 Thai restaurant awards.

    Maenam

    The restaurant that helped redefine Thai dining in Vancouver still absolutely has it. Chef Angus An marries regional Thai traditions with excellent West Coast ingredients, which means Pacific halibut turns up in green curry and local mussels arrive steaming with lemongrass, makrut lime and bird’s-eye chili. We would happily order the grilled Thai sausage and crispy rice salad every single visit, but the massaman lamb shank and three-flavour B.C. lingcod make a persuasive argument for branching out. Going big? Whole crab and lobster claypot can be ordered with 48 hours’ notice. This is destination Thai, Vancouver-style.

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    Sainam

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    Angus An goes northeast at this West End spot dedicated to the bold food of Thailand’s Isaan region. Translation: expect fermented flavours, serious grilling, sticky rice and enough papaya salad variations to make you wonder why you ever settled for just one. There’s som tum with fermented fish and salt-cured crab, smokey grilled pork neck with nahm jim jiao, Isaan sausage, crying tiger beef and Wichian Buri-style grilled chicken. Prepare to fight over the last piece of pork neck.

    Silom Thai Cuisine

    This little Knight Street restaurant packs a lot of Bangkok energy into a decidedly unfussy room. Named for one of the Thai capital’s great food-and-nightlife streets, Silom is especially good when you want dishes that wander beyond the greatest hits. Start with kai luk koei, soft-boiled eggs fried and slicked with tamarind, or wings dusted with spicy herb seasoning. Then hit the street-food section for fermented-fish som tum, grilled pork jowl or nam tok before diving into pad kee mao loaded with peppercorn, fingerroot, lime leaf and basil. Vancouver Magazine tied Silom with Maenam for silver in its 2026 Thai awards.

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    Zab Bite

    Fermented fish sauce fans, this one’s for you. Fraser Street’s Zab Bite proudly specializes in E-Sarn food from northeastern Thailand, and the menu rewards anyone willing to stray from pad Thai. Som tum comes several ways, including a funky pla ra version with fermented fish sauce, while laab moo brings minced pork, shallots, herbs, toasted rice and chili into one gloriously punchy pile. It’s lively, uncompromising food with a Michelin recommendation on its résumé.

    Unchai Thai Restaurant

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    Unchai is tiny, casual and very easy to underestimate until the food arrives. The Burrard Street spot makes its own curry and stir-fry pastes and has a particular talent for the comforting end of the Thai spectrum: fragrant noodle soups, saucy curries and stir-fries that taste much more ambitious than the room suggests. The pork boat noodles come swimming in a rich broth with pork slices, meatballs and crackling. Get a roti for swiping through whatever sauces remain at the end of the meal.

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    Sip Song Thai Cuisine

    One of the city’s more intriguing Thai spots hides on West 16th, where the menu takes inspiration from Bangkok street food but isn’t remotely interested in playing it safe. Boat noodles are the star, with a dark, deeply savoury broth and generous helpings of pork, but the kitchen goes much further: braised whole pork hock, tom yum, pomelo salad, soft-shell crab and enormous “volcano ribs” designed for a tableful. The little dining room makes it feel like you’ve stumbled onto something undiscovered. For now, at least.

    Kin Kao

    Before Song came Kin Kao, and the original Commercial Drive restaurant remains one of the city’s most dependable answers to the question, “Where should we get Thai tonight?” The philosophy is refreshingly simple: keep the menu tight, use Thai ingredients alongside fresh local produce and don’t mess with flavours that already work. Crispy chicken skin with lime leaf makes an excellent opening move, followed by drunken noodles with prawns, pork belly and gai lan, northeastern-style steak or one of the curries. The red curry with BBQ duck, pineapple and Thai sweet basil is particularly good.

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    Sawasdee Thai Restaurant

    A restaurant doesn’t survive four decades in Vancouver by phoning in the pad Thai. Sawasdee has been on Main Street since 1986, making it one of the city’s Thai originals, and there’s still plenty of swagger in the kitchen. The tamarind pad Thai is a classic for a reason, but regulars know to make room for crying tiger beef, roasted duck curry, papaya salad, prawn cakes and crab fried rice. This is the place for a big, convivial table covered with dishes, followed by everyone insisting they’re far too full before somehow finding space for mango sticky rice. 

    Sen Pad Thai

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    Yes, Granville Island Public Market is packed with distractions. Stay focused. Angus An’s casual Thai counter was inspired by the street-food stalls of Chanthaburi and proves that a market lunch can be a genuine culinary destination. Pad Thai is naturally the headline act, but don’t stop reading there: wide rice noodles are wok-fired with chicken and egg for kway teow kua gai, while crispy pork belly stars in fried rice, gai lan stir-fry and khao moo krob with soy-braised egg. Grab your food, find a seat and congratulate yourself on not settling for a sad tourist lunch.

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