Thailand less travelled: Restaurants in Singapore offering more nuanced Thai flavours

SINGAPORE – With travellers venturing beyond Bangkok, Phuket and Chiang Mai on their holidays, Thai restaurants here have been upping their game in the flavour stakes.

Some go the fusion route, some serve regional Thai food, others serve everyday meals for people who want a more adventurous daily diet. Restaurants are also importing ingredients from Thailand, whether it is shallots and garlic or giant river prawns and fish sauce.

New restaurants looking to make an impression include Im Jai by Pun Im at Icon Village, serving set meals; Nampla at Marine Parade Central, offering tastes of south and central Thailand; Fourgather at Suntec City, with a kids’ menu and pasta dishes with Thai flavours; and Jungle in Ann Siang Hill, which sources artisanal ingredients.

Restaurants that have been around for longer are also levelling up. Sawadee Thai Cuisine, which opened 24 years ago, reopened in January after spending $220,000 on renovations starting in late 2024. Head chef Suthasinee Deerob, 39, is from Si Sa Ket in north-eastern Thailand and she has been introducing diners to flavours from her home town.

Singaporean owner Andrew Chew, 41, says the food in that part of Thailand is spicy and sour, with fermented ingredients and grilled meats featuring strongly.

The restaurant started out as a neighbourhood eatery in Sembawang with familiar dishes. When it relocated to Tan Quee Lan Street in Bugis in 2013, it went more upmarket, with ingredients such as Australian wagyu and Kurobuta pork from Japan.

About half the menu is new, and the restaurant is drilling down to details, importing ingredients such as shallots and garlic from Si Sa Ket.

Chef Suthasinee uses smoked snakehead fish from her home town for a new dish, Tom Khlong Soup ($14 a bowl), which is flavoured with lemongrass, tamarind and chilli. Other new offerings include Jungle Curry Fish ($28) from northern Thailand, made without coconut milk.

Mr Chew says: “In the early years in Bugis, we faced the challenge of overcoming the perception that Thai food should always be inexpensive. Gradually, with the rise of social media, Singaporeans have become more discerning and well-informed about food. They now have a deeper understanding of what they eat and have developed a more sophisticated palate. Over the years, we’ve noticed that while they still love classics, they are increasingly open to discovering lesser-known dishes and hearing stories about them.”

Yaowarat Seafood, which opened in 2014, is named after a street in Bangkok’s Chinatown and serves Thai-Chinese seafood. The 60-seat restaurant in Lavender Street started offering tingkat meals at the start of 2025. Diners can order the meals to eat in the 60-seat restaurant or for takeaway.

Co-owner David Ang, 44, says the restaurant started offering the tingkat options when it noticed young families moving into the new HDB flats nearby.

“More families are coming to the restaurant for meals,” he says. “We thought of how to make it more affordable for them to have their daily meals with us.”

A meal is priced at $39.90 and is good for two to three people. A typical menu might feature tom yum seafood soup, Thai kang kong, basil pork, chicken omelette and three servings of white rice; or seaweed egg soup, salted fish bean sprout, three moo ping or grilled pork skewers, deep-fried seabass with Thai mango salad and three servings of white rice.

Subscribers who choose to have their tingkat meals in the restaurant can do so from Mondays to Thursdays with a 10 per cent service charge. There are discounts for those who subscribe for three, four or five meals a week.

Mr Ang says business for the tingkat meals has picked up and the restaurant is looking to add more home-style dishes to the tingkat menu.

Value Thai sets: Im Jai by Pun Im (opens in April)

Where: 01-78/81 Icon Village, 12 Gopeng Street
Open: 11am to 8pm (weekdays), 11am to 2pm (Saturdays), closed on Sundays
Info: @imjai.punim (Instagram)

Chef Vincent Pang, who has been running Pun Im, a Thai private-dining business since 2020, says he never intended to open a restaurant. But the 38-year-old, who trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Bangkok, is now set to do just that, with the 40-seat Im Jai by Pun Im.

His father, who had been battling amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a motor neurone disease, died in 2024 at age 66. “I thought of opening a small restaurant for my mother to manage, so she would have something to do,” he says. “I saw a shop space that was ideal for a little restaurant.

“In Singapore, there are two categories of Thai restaurants – fine dining and very casual places. There is a huge market gap I can fill.”

The restaurant, which is costing about $400,000 to set up, will serve all-day set meals priced at $16.80 and cater to a predominantly office crowd. At night, there will also be Thai craft beers, a snack platter and other offerings.

On the menu will be some of the greatest hits from his private-dining business, which he intends to continue running. One of the sets will feature his spicy and sour pork rib soup with Thai mirepoix fried rice. The soup features large pork rib, pork soft bone and pig tendon, and the rice is fried with garlic and white peppercorns. Another features tom yum black tiger prawns with coconut kaffir lime rice.

For dessert, there is red ruby with smoked coconut sorbet ($9.80), and savoury specials include jumbo grilled river prawns ($39.80 each) imported from Thailand, served with two sauces – nam jim seafood and nampla wan, a sweet and sour sauce.

The price of the bar snack platter has not been decided, but it will include moo ping or grilled pork skewers, tom yum crab balls, deep-fried pork belly, housemade Thai pork floss, and his version of Wingz Zabb, spicy and tangy fried chicken wings that are a hot seller at KFC Thailand.

As with Pun Im, some of the proceeds from the restaurant will go to charity. He says: “I want to serve food that fills the heart and soul.”

Hometown flavours: Nampla

Where: 01-590, 83 Marine Parade Central, tel: 9643-0912 
Open: 11am to 3pm, 4.30 to 9.30pm daily
Info: @nampla.sg (Instagram)

Business at Nampla, which opened in December 2024, has been so good that the restaurant sprouted a second wing a few doors away about a month later.

That second dining area, which has a street-stall set-up from which some of the food is prepared and plated, is set to undergo changes too. The owners are taking away the stalls to make way for more seats.

Clearly, the punchy flavours, many from the southern part of Thailand, are resonating with Marine Parade residents, who have been known to queue about 30 minutes to get a table on weekends.

In all, the two dining areas can seat 70, and when the second dining space is reconfigured, there will be 15 to 20 additional seats.

Business partners Simon Wong, 37, and Song Supansa, 32, met while chef Wong, born in Penang and now a Singapore permanent resident, was travelling in Nakhon Si Thammarat in southern Thailand. He was there to look for new business ideas.

Chef Song was visiting family in her home town. At a temple fair in May 2024, he sampled her Thai basil pork and seafood with rice and a sunny-side-up egg.

He says: “The taste was so different, and I asked to meet the chef.”

Chef Song, a Singapore permanent resident who has lived here for about a decade and worked as a private chef, says: “He told me about his plans to open a restaurant and I was so excited. I am so happy to bring the taste of my home town to Singapore.”

One of these dishes is Kung Klua Prik Krea ($22.90), tiger prawns fried with chilli and salt, with fried garlic on top.

Chef Wong says: “They use very simple ingredients, but how is the fried garlic so good? I kept eating it, and we went back a few times to perfect the cooking technique.”

One of the most popular items on the menu is Khao Phad Rodfai or Train Fried Rice. They named it after the place which inspired the dish – a stall next to the train tracks in Bangkok. It is priced at $9.90 for rice fried with mushroom, chicken or pork, and $12.90 for a version with prawns.

Other signatures include Thai-style stewed pork leg rice (from $9.80), the scent of which wafts from the second dining area; and Kanom Krok ($5.50 for 18 pieces), little flower-shaped cakes made with coconut milk and thick pandan juice that the kitchen extracts from the leaves.

With a name like Nampla, which is fish sauce in Thai, the restaurant uses five types for different dishes. The chefs are keeping the brands secret.

Family-friendly Thai: Fourgather

Where: 01-505 Suntec City Tower 2, 3 Temasek Boulevard
Open: 11am to 10pm daily
Info: @fourgather.sg (Instagram)

Just 10 months after Fourgather opened at Amoy Hotel in Telok Ayer, the brand has sprouted another outlet, this one in Suntec City.

The 66-seat restaurant, which soft-opened in December 2024, serves more family-friendly food and has a kids’ menu, says Ms Ade Lau, 38, a photographer by trade who started the brand with three friends.

On the menu are dishes such as green curry pasta (S$19.90), tom yum seafood pasta ($26.90), Thai braised fish maw soup ($39.90) and fluffy jumbo crab omelette ($32.90). Kids’ options include bacon and corn fried rice ($14.90), pad penne with chicken and hotdog ($17.90) and crispy popcorn chicken ($9.90).

Ms Lau says: “At Amoy, our focus remains on using traditional dishes as the foundation, with slight tweaks made to suit local preference.

“At Suntec City, since we are located just beside SuperPark, an indoor playground, and in a mall that welcomes many families, it felt like the perfect opportunity to introduce a kids’ menu. We also felt like it was the right time and place for us to explore our new fusion dishes.”

At both restaurants, diners can choose from three levels of spice – mild spicy, spicy and Thai spicy.

She says: “From our experience at the Amoy Hotel branch, we’ve learnt that Singaporeans generally have a lower spice tolerance than we initially anticipated. Most diners opt for Levels 1 or 2 and still request the food be made ‘less spicy’ overall.

“But for those who crave the authentic fiery spice of Thai cuisine, they can simply opt for Level 3.”

Artisanal ingredients: Jungle

Where: 10 Ann Siang Hill; tel: 8389-2258
Open: 6pm till late (Tuesdays to Saturdays), closed on Sundays and Mondays
Info: @jungle.thai (Instagram)

At Jungle, modelled after Bangkok’s late-night watering holes, the artisanal fish sauce in the food is made in small batches in Samut Songkhram, a province on the Gulf of Thailand.

It gets an umami boost from oak-ka-lae, a type of herring, says Mr Ravin Bajwa, 42, who co-founded Jungle with chef Liaw Wei Loon, 41. Their 50-seat restaurant opened in June 2024.

Mr Bajwa says: “We try to showcase a wider variety of dishes not so commonly found in most Thai restaurants in Singapore. We also take a produce-driven approach to our cooking, which means going the extra mile to either source or bring in ingredients that you can’t always get here.

“We have a small menu compared with most Thai restaurants, but that’s the only way we can ensure we can remain respectful to the craft of cooking that we have come to admire.”

Other special ingredients include small-batch shrimp paste, palm sugar, dried chillies and spices, including Makwaen, which is related to Sichuan peppercorns.

These ingredients go into signature dishes such as pomelo-lemongrass salad, candied coconut, dried shrimp ($19), made with Thong Dee pomelos, known for their sweetness; Northern-style duck laab, lanna spices ($20), with Makwaen and other spices; and sugarcane-smoked pork jowl, nam jim jaew ($28), pork smoked with sugarcane and lychee wood before being finished off on the charcoal grill.

Mr Bajwa says: “Some guests have said we’re not spicy enough, some say we’re too spicy and a few have said we’re not authentic enough. It’s hard for us to get drawn into what’s authentic and what’s not – we just do what we can to showcase what we love about Thai cooking, and hope the way we approach our cooking and our restaurant resonates with them.

“If there is a takeaway for guests, it is that Thai cuisine isn’t just about cheap street eats or spicy, chilli-laden dishes. It’s wonderfully diverse, complex and an incredibly inspiring cuisine that deserves a little more recognition.”