Best Thai Food in Chicago, Ranked

Arun Sampanthavivat opened Arun's in 1985 while he was a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago — Thailand-born, bringing an upscale, tasting-menu approach to Thai food decades before 'elevated' ethnic cooking was even a category anyone talked about. Sources disagree on the exact early path: one account has it starting in a North Side storefront and moving to Albany Park in 1988, another says it began on Irving Park Road and moved to Kedzie Avenue in 1998 — worth noting honestly rather than picking one. Either way, Arun's spent nearly 40 years in Albany Park before Sampanthavivat closed it on December 29, 2024, when he retired.

He didn't stop there. His follow-up project, Taste of Thai Town, is a genuinely unusual piece of adaptive reuse: a converted 1938 police station at 4461 N. Pulaski, now holding a restaurant, a noodle bar, a wellness center, and a Buddhist shrine under one roof. It opened after a multi-year delay and more than $1 million in city tax-increment financing, and local coverage describes it as the first — and so far only — formally recognized Thai Town in Chicago.

It's also planted in the same square mile of Albany Park that's already turned up three other times on this page in Filipino and Korean Chicago's own history — a port of entry for three different immigrant communities, overlapping decades apart, which is worth noticing as its own real pattern rather than three unrelated coincidences.

The list above runs well past Arun's old neighborhood. Thai Aree House and Zaab-E-LEE's Isan street food still hold Albany Park down, while Tarra and Herb push Thai food into genuine fine-dining territory in River North and Edgewater — the same ambition Sampanthavivat brought to the cuisine 40 years ago, just with a new generation of names on the door. That's a real, specific piece of this city's food history, not a tourist-brochure one — exactly the kind of thing I ❤ Chi is actually pointing at.