The Best Thai Restaurant in Chicago Is in Ukrainian Village and It Tastes Like Thailand
JJ's Street Food doesn't do pad thai for people who haven't been to Thailand. It does everything else, and it does it better than anywhere else in the city.
My mother is boisterous. This is relevant.
She was passing through Chicago on her way back from Thailand, a layover between Heathrow and O'Hare. On the flight she heard two Thai women talking in Thai and introduced herself, because that is what my mother does. By the time she landed she had made friends. By the time she got to the restaurant and went to the bathroom, she came back with one of those women in tow to introduce us to our table. That woman was Gina. The owner of JJ's Street Food. And she didn't know that Gina owned this restaurant! That was my introduction to the best Thai restaurant in Chicago.
The food did not disappoint.
Walk in and Thai pop is blaring. If you know Thai pop, you know it's fun. The place is small and usually packed, but tables turn over quickly and the wait is never punishing. This is Ukrainian Village, not a tourist corridor. The room has the buzz of a place people come back to regularly because the food is the point.
And the food is the point. This is not a pad thai restaurant. If pad thai is the beginning and end of your Thai food vocabulary, JJ's is going to be a different experience. If you've spent time in Thailand, you will feel immediately at home. The menu reads like the streets of Chiang Mai or Bangkok. Simple, specific, confident.
Our yardstick at any Thai restaurant is always the som tum, the papaya salad. Too many places make it aggressively spicy and call it authentic. Real som tum is not a heat delivery mechanism. It's salty, sweet, sour, spicy, funky with fish sauce, chewy, complex. JJ's nails it. It might be outdone by their corn salad, which does everything the papaya salad does with a different texture and sweetness. My recommendation is to get one on the first visit and go back for the other. You will go back.
The first time we went it was a brutal cold spell, the kind of Chicago winter that makes you question your choices. We ordered the Guay Tiew Nam Sood Boran pork noodle soup. I cannot undersell this enough. The broth is clear and it tastes exactly like Thailand. Sour, sweet, salty, all of it in balance. It is the kind of soup that makes a cold day feel like the right day to be alive.
Everything we have ordered at JJ's has been excellent. No misses. Not one. This is the best Thai restaurant in Chicago. It is one of the best in the country. Gina's restaurant earned that claim the old fashioned way, one bowl at a time.
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