SaRanRom Thai – Bangkok's night market, served family-style in Elmhurst

On Broadway in Elmhurst, among the steam-table counters and noodle shops of Queens' so-called Little Bangkok, SaRanRom Thai cooks the food Chef Nueng grew up eating in Bangkok's oldest market district, Phra Nakhon. Opened in 2020, the restaurant has become one of the most talked-about addresses on a street already dense with Thai kitchens, and it holds a MICHELIN Bib Gourmand, the guide's distinction for cooking of real quality at a moderate price. The name translates loosely as cool, happy and joyful — also the name of a royal garden in Bangkok — and the room lives up to it: small, informal, built for sharing rather than staging a photograph. Dishes leave the kitchen the moment they are ready, in the order a Thai family would eat them, and the menu deliberately roams beyond the central-Thai staples most New Yorkers know, into the herb-forward salads of Isan, the curries of the north and the street-cart dishes rarely seen on a Queens menu.

01The room and the setting

SaRanRom Thai occupies a narrow storefront on Broadway, and the dining room keeps to the scale of the block around it. The restaurant has a cozy interior with just about eight or so tables with an exposed brick wall on one side and a wooden wall on the other, and the rather minimal interior is filled with plants and light fixtures. The MICHELIN Guide notes a terrace among its facilities, a useful extension in Elmhurst's warmer months.

There is no pretence of fine dining here: paper napkins, shared plates, and a kitchen visible enough that the smell of chilli hitting hot oil reaches the front tables. The restaurant is open every day from 11:30am to 10pm, and the entrance and seating are wheelchair accessible.

02The chef

Chef Nueng grew up in Phra Nakhon, Bangkok's first and oldest district and home to its historic old market, surrounded by hawker stalls and street carts. He learned technique, balance and timing the way most people learn a language — by immersion, inside generations-old family recipes rather than from a formal kitchen. After moving to New York he worked alongside other chefs across the city before opening his own menu in Elmhurst in 2020, built on that childhood rather than on any single regional template.

Insider tip

Two blocks from the 7 train at Elmhurst Avenue; metered parking along Broadway.

The result is a menu that pulls from different corners of Thailand in the same sitting: the familiar central-Thai curries sit alongside the sour, herb-heavy salads of Isan and the drier, spicier cooking of the south — a range the restaurant's own staff describe as dishes that don't usually make it onto New York menus.

03The cooking

The kitchen marks its own spice levels with chilli icons on the menu, and warns that its version runs hotter than the average New York "Thai spicy" — a claim borne out by dishes such as the Kee Mao Thai, flat rice noodles cooked in the original style with fresh chilli, basil, kaffir lime leaf and young peppercorn. Every allergen is listed against each dish, from peanuts and shellfish to sesame and egg, so a table can order communally without guesswork.

Curry pastes are made in house, and the kitchen's range shows in dishes that rarely travel together on one menu: a dry, northeastern Southern Spicy Minced Pork built on yellow kua-kling paste; a clear, lemongrass-sharp Tom Yum; and a Massaman built on a sweet yellow curry paste with potato and fried onion.

04What to order

The Yum Pla Duk Fu is the dish regulars order by name — crispy fried shredded catfish tossed with a sour-sweet mango salad, red onion, scallion, chilli and peanut, and the most-ordered plate on the menu. The Pineapple Curry Duck follows closely: roasted half duck in red curry with pineapple, lychee, grape and basil, a dish that turns a usually savoury curry distinctly fruit-forward.

Beyond the two signatures, the Miang Ka-Na — dried pork with lime, chilli, ground peanut, ginger and Chinese broccoli leaves — and the Khao Soi Noodle, a creamy yellow curry soup with chicken leg and both steamed and crispy egg noodle, show the kitchen's range across small plates and noodle soups. The Crispy Pork with Basil, fried pork belly stir-fried with basil in a sweet-salty seasoning, is the house's answer to a dish found on nearly every Thai menu in the city, done with more lacquer and crunch than most.

05Wine and drinks

There is no wine list in the conventional sense; instead, a dedicated cocktail menu called Love at First Sip runs through names such as Bird of Paradise, Golden Lychee, Lonely Planet and Under the Andaman, built to stand up to the chilli and lime running through the food rather than sit politely beside it.

06The neighbourhood

SaRanRom Thai sits inside Elmhurst's Little Bangkok corridor, a short stretch of Broadway that holds one of the city's densest concentrations of Thai restaurants, grocers and bakeries. The restaurant is two blocks from the 7 train at Elmhurst Avenue, with the Q58 and Q53 buses running the same strip; metered parking lines Broadway itself, with municipal lots a short walk away for anyone arriving by car.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.