Thai Food Finally Gets Its Flowers
At Tarra in River North, Chef Namo Chowcharoen gives the food he grew up on the full fine dining treatment.
Tarra is the restaurant I've been waiting for Chicago to get. Thai food has been loved in this city for decades, but mostly as the casual weeknight order: a couple of curries, a pad see ew, a takeout container on the couch. Tarra, on Hubbard Street in River North, takes the same food seriously enough to give it the full fine dining treatment. A Thai chef. Thai recipes. A staff speaking Thai on the floor of a gorgeous new restaurant.
Thai food is finally getting its flowers.
Chef Namo Chowcharoen was born in Bangkok and raised in Sakaeo, a rural province in eastern Thailand, where he learned to cook in the kitchens of his grandmother and his father. He trained at Dusit Thani College in Bangkok, then cooked his way through China, France, Mongolia, and Hungary before landing in Chicago.
Here, he spent about a decade cooking American food. He started on the line at The Franklin Room, the River North whiskey bar, when it opened in 2015 and worked his way up to executive chef, with stops at Madison Bar and Kitchen and Union Sushi + Barbeque Bar along the way.
Tarra is his chance to cook the food he grew up on, a short walk from where he spent years cooking someone else's menu.
Tarra is the Thai word for nourishing, purifying water, and the space takes the name literally. It fills the old Vinyl space at Hubbard and LaSalle, which sat empty for almost a decade, and you would never know it. The wooden ceiling warps and ripples overhead like a current, and every wave of it points toward the big bar in the middle of the main dining area. It's the first thing you see and the thing you keep looking back at. A mosaic on the wall carries the same flow. The whole place is moody and dark, but warm and inviting, modern and organic at the same time. A smaller side dining area has its own charm.
The real design move is the open expo. Chefs and servers run plates from a fully open kitchen, so you watch your food come together before it comes to you.
Dinner opens with amuse bouches inspired by Royal Thai cuisine, the elaborate, presentation-forward end of Thai cooking. They do their job and wake up your palate. The ma hor is the one to remember: a sweet lychee stuffed with a spicy, funky chicken meatball. It's the perfect first taste of Thai food, and it says sawasdee ka loudly and warmly.
Every Thai restaurant I review goes through the som tam test. No exceptions. Tarra passed. The funk is balanced with palm sugar, and it's clearly pounded palm sugar, because you get big raw chunks the way you would from a cart in Bangkok. Then the heat sneaks up a little more with every bite and catches your tongue before you see it coming. This is som tam worth the name.
My mom lives in Chiang Mai, so when I saw sai ua on the menu, there was no decision to make. It's one of our favorite northern Thai sausages, packed with lemongrass, and Tarra's tasted exactly right. On the street, you eat it with your hands, with a little pad of sticky rice on the side.
At Tarra, rice doesn't come with the meal, sticky or steamed, so order it. I went with the turmeric sticky rice, the way you would at a stall. The flavor was there. The turmeric gave it depth, and it was a great match for the sausage and the condiments. The texture wasn't. It was too sticky to be steamed rice and not sticky enough to hold together, so the starch ended up all over my fingers, and I finished with a fork and chopsticks. It was the only miss of the night, and an easy one to forgive when the flavor was right.
I could eat the skewers all day. Get the pork jowl or the nuea ping, and the chicken satay is a classic for a reason.
The pad thai is the most interesting thing on the menu. Shredded papaya stands in for the rice noodles, and crispy turnip cakes replace the tofu with something crunchy and savory. Every swap was a surprise. The flavor wasn't. It tasted like pad thai, and that's the trick.
The best thing on the table was the massaman short rib. Tender, deep, complex. I would bathe in that sauce. Get jasmine rice on the side to catch every drop.
Don't skip dessert. A sponge cake with lemon curd, lychee, and sorbet reads like a pastry chef's take on Thai flavor: sweet, sour, tart, and crunchy, each one almost too much on its own. Together, it's complex, balanced, and it all makes sense.
What stays with me most is that Tarra is bigger than its chef. I loved hearing the staff speaking Thai in a fine dining restaurant, and the hospitality has that Land of Smiles warmth. The restaurant says it was built to be a home for more Thai talent over time, not a showcase for one celebrity chef. You can feel that on the floor.
Tarra is open Wednesday through Sunday, 5 to 10 p.m. When dinner is done, Sura, the cocktail lounge downstairs, runs on Thai ingredients and stays open until midnight.
Thai food has always been loved in Chicago. Tarra makes it a destination. Plan your trip around it.
Khob khun khrap, Chef Namo.
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