Baan Phadthai

Baan Phadthai exists to answer one question seriously: how good can pad thai actually be? In a restored shophouse off Charoen Krung, the kitchen builds its Michelin-recognised noodles on a house sauce of many ingredients — palm sugar, tamarind, dried shrimp and a long supporting cast — then chars the noodles properly in the wok and crowns them with river prawns, crab or slow-cooked pork. It is pad thai at three or four times street price and, most visitors conclude, worth every baht as the dish's dressed-up ceiling. The setting matches the cooking — vintage Thai interiors, proper cocktails, air conditioning — which makes it the pad thai for a date night or a first-night dinner, in the gallery-and-café quarter of Charoenkrung near the river hotels. Good to know: reservations are wise at dinner and easy to make online; lunch is walk-in friendly. The tasting of both the classic and the crab versions settles most tables' debates. It stands in deliberate contrast to Thipsamai's theatrical street original across town — doing both is the correct pad thai itinerary.