The Best Thai Food in Canada

The specials list is where Pichai really moves, rotating through local ingredients that shift with the season and Quebec's own producers. This boisterous Thai restaurant on St-Hubert leans hard into Isaan cooking, the spicy, funky, herb-driven food of northern Thailand, alongside a wine list of low-intervention whites and skin-contact pours. Thai families and well-travelled regulars fill the room together, both with strong opinions about what to order. Ranked 36th on Canada's 100 Best.

A 20-seat fine dining room in Steveston Village, which is otherwise known for fish and chips and frozen yogurt, turns out to be an oddly perfect home for royal Thai cuisine. White-gloved servers bring each course of an 18-dish tasting menu to white-clothed tables overlooking the Fraser River. The chef trained privately with Bangkok cooks before opening this, having no restaurant background at all. Canada's 100 Best ranks it among the country's top 25.

A casual Thai restaurant on East Broadway where the green curry beef shank reportedly stops conversations cold. Song holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand and Vancouver Magazine's gold for best Thai, and the room feels built for lingering over pomelo salad and lemongrass wings with a group that shows up hungry. The menu runs deeper than the familiar standards, though the pad Thai earns its place on the table without apology.

The menu lists "Silk Pappadelle with sesame, pecorino and secrets," which tells you a lot about what Deer + Almond is up to. This fine dining room on Princess Street lands on Canada's 100 Best at number fifty, and earns it through Prairie ingredients routed through unexpected global detours: local venison with Thai nahm jim, beets alongside tuna and ginger-soy. A four-course prix fixe runs the dining room; the bar takes à la carte orders from the same kitchen.

Angus An runs a small empire of Thai concepts across Vancouver, but this Kitsilano original is where it all started and still where the cooking cuts deepest. Maenam is a sit-down Thai restaurant where the kitchen balances bold aromatics with serious precision, and rustic-looking plates consistently surprise you. The wine list is genuinely thought-through, not an afterthought. It holds a Michelin Guide selection and has taken Vancouver Magazine's gold for Best Thai more times than anyone's counting.

The boat noodles here, a funky, aromatic beef broth thick with meatballs and tripe, tell you right away that Zab Bite is more interested in northeastern Thai cooking than in playing it safe. Pad Thai is on the menu because it has to be, but the grilled pork jowl with toasted rice and nam jaew is the reason regulars come back. A casual, cheerful Fraser Street spot where requesting extra spice is treated as a reasonable life choice.

You walk through a tiny coffee shop at the front, keep going, and eventually the dining room appears around a small kitchen fitted with binchotan charcoal grills. It's a Thai restaurant on Ossington, narrow and sunlit, with a Michelin Bib Gourmand to its name. The menu is tight and considered, running from sticky rice spring rolls through green curry with fish and red curry with duck, all built around fresh herbs and chilis that mean business.

Dumplings shaped like flowers and rice pressed into jewel-colored mounds set the tone at Kiin, a Royal Thai restaurant on Adelaide where the food looks almost too considered to eat. Chef Nuit Regular takes familiar markers like khao soi, larb, and hot and sour beef soup and reframes them through a courtly lens, everything arriving in petite bowls with an attention to presentation that stops just short of theater. The Michelin Guide has it listed among selected restaurants in Toronto.

A terrace, two floors, and a Chinatown corner that always seems to have a lineup outside it. This is a Southern Thai restaurant where the kitchen leans into the heat and funk of regional cooking, the kind that doesn't soften things for the room. The staff are young and quick, which matters because tables turn fast enough that the line moves. The Michelin Guide has it selected, and the coconut green curry alone explains why.

Named for the northern Thai village where the chef first cooked, this packed Toronto restaurant brings family recipes and street food to a room that leans boho-mod and never seems to quiet down. The menu ranges across Thailand, but the northern plates are where to focus, khao soi especially. Everything is sized for sharing and calibrated by heat level, which sounds like a small thing until you're at the table arguing about it.

Isan-style som tum made with fermented fish paste is the point of this simple basement Thai spot on Gerrard, and the heat scale runs to levels most menus don't acknowledge. The papaya salad comes with salted crab if you want the full classic treatment, and the grilled pork jowl has quietly become the other reason regulars keep coming back. No alcohol, but the café next door handles drinks, which feels like a very sensible arrangement.

The nham ngeaw, a tomato broth tangled with pork ribs, vermicelli, and dried red cotton tree flowers, is the kind of bowl that makes you question why you ever eat anything else. Fat Mao is a noodle shop in Chinatown serving Thai-style soups in a no-fuss room where the food does all the work. Chef Angus An keeps the menu tight and the broths deeply considered, which is a polite way of saying this place is far more serious than its vibe lets on.