Thai

Roughly 30,000 Thai New Yorkers live in the city, the large majority in the Queens neighbourhoods of Elmhurst, Woodside and Jackson Heights. Some families arrived during the Vietnam War years, but much of the community settled in the early 2000s, and the restaurant scene followed rather than preceded them — a decade ago the neighbourhood had only a handful of Thai places. Elmhurst is the centre of it now: a stretch of Woodside Avenue is co-named Little Thailand Way, and the cooking leans heavily toward Isan, the northeastern regional style that is sourer, funkier and considerably hotter than the pad thai most visitors arrive expecting. Menus frequently keep the two traditions on separate pages, one written for the neighbourhood and one for everyone else, so it is worth asking which side you are ordering from — and worth saying plainly how much heat you actually want, because the Isan default is not calibrated for visitors.

Live from OpenStreetMap, filtered to venues tagged thai within about a mile of Times Square — thin coverage outside that radius, and tagging is crowd-sourced, so treat this as a starting point.

No tagged thai spots turned up near Midtown right now.