Food
The former Sa Wad Dee Thai storefront on San Pablo Avenue is back in business, and with it comes an unexpected luxury for Richmond residents: more choices. With the January opening of Top Thai Cuisine, San Pablo Avenue now has multiple Thai restaurants clustered within a few blocks, turning an ordinary stretch of The Avenue into a small but serious noodle corridor.
Top Thai Cuisine opened January 28 at 12200 San Pablo Avenue, across from the Wendy's that's about to get renovated into something modern, near the Golden Gate Western Wear with its golden horse standing guard out front, down from Gul Auto Care, where the tires are stacked neatly in the parking lot. The old Sa Wad Dee Thai space sat empty for a couple of years. Now it's not.
There is a lot on the menu. Red, green, and yellow curries with your choice of what to put in them. BBQ chicken marinated with Thai herbs. Satay chicken on skewers with peanut sauce. Pad see ew, pad kee mao, basil fried rice, pineapple fried rice with cashews and raisins. Rice plates, coconut soup, and tom yum. The kind of menu where you could eat there twice a week for a month and never order the same thing.
Inside Top Thai Cuisine, the space runs narrow and clean. Tables line up against walls painted warm colors. Simple chairs. Nothing fancy. It's bright enough to see what you're eating.
We ordered Pad Thai with Shrimp because we are suckers for saucy noodles and peanuts. We were warned that the dish has peanuts.
The dish arrives steaming hot. The noodles glisten, coated thick with tamarind sauce that pools slightly at the edges. Five shrimp buried in the noodles, pink and proper. Crushed peanuts scattered like confetti. Bean sprouts piled high. Green onions cut clean.
After nearly 20 years in Castro Valley, the family didn’t tweak the menu — they just brought it to Richmond. They source ingredients from the farmers' market every morning. The vegetables taste like they remember being vegetables. The noodles come soft with resistance, coated in tamarind sauce, hitting tangy and sweet. The shrimp, not rubbery, not underdone, cooked properly.
One previous reviewer noted missing bean sprouts at Top Thai. They were there this time. Fresh. Crunchy. Doing their job.
Meanwhile, Pra Jam at 12440 San Pablo Avenue keeps doing what it does: authentic recipes passed down through generations, traditional cooking techniques, and open until 8:30 most nights. Two different families. Two menus. Same stretch of San Pablo Avenue, somewhere in what might be our Gourmet Ghetto, assuming that runs from San Pablo to the El Cerrito city limits, probably.
At Pra Jam, we ordered the Pad Thai and Red Curry. The red curry runs deep orange-red, thick with coconut milk and curry paste. Green beans float among chunks of chicken, basil leaves dark against the surface. Oil pools at the edges where the spices have separated out, the way proper curry does when it's been cooked long enough for the flavors to break down and recombine into something new.
At Pra Jam we ordered the Pad Thai and Red Curry. The red curry runs deep orange-red with green beans and chicken floating in coconut milk broth, while the pad thai noodles glisten with tamarind sauce and fresh bean sprouts.
The Pad Thai noodles coil glossy with tamarind sauce. Bean sprouts piled on top, still white and crisp, not wilted from steam. The noodles have that pale orange tint that means they've been properly coated, each strand separate from the next. The portion runs generous, the kind that feeds one person well or two people adequately.
Not much further down the road, there's Pakao Ma Thai Lao at 11880 San Pablo Avenue, just over the border in El Cerrito. Now there's this embarrassment of riches, this surplus of lemongrass and basil, this abundance we kept asking for.
The golden horse watches. The tires stay stacked. Wendy's prepares for its makeover. How long the old neighborhood lasts is anybody's guess. But right now, on this stretch of The Avenue, we have more curry and noodle dealers than we did a few years ago, and that counts for something.
Sa Wad Dee closed. The space sat empty. Top Thai opened. We win. The Pad Thai was good. We'll be back to both.
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