This story is presented as part of The Stranger’s Guide to Food and Drink 2018: the Well-Done & Rare Edition, which features our favorites of Seattle’s most bountiful tastes, including Thai food, and where to find more elusive flavors.
In a city where Thai food is more popular than pizza, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a purveyor of pad thai. But many places present anodyne, Americanized versions of Thai cuisine for the unadventurous palate. Here we’ve rounded up the unique Seattle gems distinct enough to stand out in a sea of pad see ew—the restaurants that specialize in the bold, funky flavors of authentic Northern Thai street food, the restaurants that don’t succumb to “vanity spicing” (meaning they’re not kidding around when you ask for five stars), and the ones that branch out with special dishes you won’t find elsewhere.
Buddha Ruksa, you will be informed by a number of framed press clippings as you walk in the door, has a specialty, and that is its famous crack chicken (well, technically the menu has it as “crispy garlic chicken,” but that’s not what its legion of devoted fans call it). It’s a sticky-sweet, smoky, crunchy, battered-and-glazed chicken dish laced with red chilies and shatteringly crisp fried basil leaves, and it’s inspired a myriad of online threads with curious folks speculating as to what they put in it to make it so damn habit-forming. Is it tamarind? Fish sauce? The world may never know. Though the crack chicken is the clear standout, the rest of the food here is also solid.
