Same Same Is a Funky Place to Be But The Thai Food Leaves Me Wanting a Little More Funk.
A charming Roscoe Village spot with open doors, a good patio, and a chef who clearly loves Thai culture. The fish sauce is missing and you can taste it.
Same Same opened in early 2020 on the cutest strip in Roscoe Village, right before the pandemic tried to end it before it started. Chef Kris Henry built the menu around Thai street food he encountered across several extended trips through Southeast Asia, including northern khao soi and Hat Yai fried chicken from the south. The curry pastes and chili sauces are made in-house. The care is visible throughout.
The space earns its reputation. Open doors on a good day, a patio that fills fast, an energy that is upbeat and light in a way that fits the neighborhood exactly. This is a genuinely fun place to be on a warm Roscoe Village afternoon. Same Same has that going for it and it is not a small thing.
Here is where I have to be honest about my particular lens. I visit my mother in Thailand regularly. I grew up eating her food. Thai cuisine is not an abstraction for me. It is a specific set of flavors with a specific internal logic, and when I eat Same Same I can taste that it was cooked by a farang ("Farang" (ฝรั่ง) is a Thai word used to describe a person of Western descent or a white foreigner). That is not a dig at the chef, who clearly loves Thai culture and has spent real time in it. But loving a cuisine and being of it are two different things, and that gap shows up in the food. The flavors are present but not deep. The heat is there but not layered. The brightness comes through but the funk underneath it does not. Thai food at its best operates in all of those registers simultaneously, and when one or two go missing the whole thing flattens out.
Fish sauce is the most direct explanation. It is the ingredient that gives Thai cooking its depth and its soul, and you can taste when a kitchen has dialed it back or left it out entirely. The papaya salad is where this shows up most clearly. Som tum lives in balance: sour, salty, spicy, funky, all pulling at once. At Same Same it reads sweet and sour without the depth underneath. When that balance tips, the dish loses what makes it worth ordering in the first place.
The Hat Yai fried chicken is the stronger order. Solid, well fried, with a flavor that leans a little more inspired-by than strictly regional, but enjoyable on its own terms.
The choices Henry makes that pull the food away from traditional Thai technique work in his favor for a specific audience. Vegans are very well served here. Gluten-free diners have real options across the menu. For a mixed-diet group looking for Thai food in Roscoe Village without navigating a complicated menu, Same Same is a genuinely accommodating choice.
Come for the patio, stay for the Hat Yai chicken, and know going in what the menu is doing.
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