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Night + Market
Night + Market opened in 2011 in West Hollywood, founded by chef Kris Yenbamroong, whose family had already run the more traditional Thai Talay Room restaurant in the same space for years before Kris took over and pivoted the concept toward a specifically funkier, more adventurous style of Thai street food. Yenbamroong built the menu around dishes he described as reflecting how his own family actually ate at home and during trips to Thailand, rather than the more restrained menu his family's original restaurant had served to a broader American audience, including intensely flavored, fermented, and pungent dishes less commonly found on American Thai menus. The restaurant's crispy rice salad and Isan-style sausage became particularly celebrated dishes, and Yenbamroong's approach — combining serious culinary technique with an intentionally casual, rock-and-roll aesthetic and playlist — helped position Night + Market as part of a broader wave of chef-driven restaurants reinterpreting immigrant family cuisine for a new generation of American diners. Night + Market's combination of Kris Yenbamroong's family-restaurant lineage and his deliberate pivot toward more intensely flavored, less Americanized Thai street food has made it one of the most influential Thai restaurants in shaping how a younger generation of chefs approach regional Southeast Asian cuisine.
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Fish Cheeks
Fish Cheeks opened in 2017 in Manhattan's NoHo neighborhood, founded by chef Chat Suansilphong alongside restaurateurs from the Uncle Boons restaurant group, built around a seafood-forward Thai menu that leaned into bold, structured tasting-menu-adjacent presentation rather than a casual street-food format. The restaurant's design, featuring a large mounted sailfish and nautical decor, reflected its seafood-centric menu directly, and dishes like its whole fried fish and crab fried rice became particularly celebrated among New York food critics for balancing serious technique with genuinely bold, assertive Thai flavor profiles. Fish Cheeks received strong critical reviews upon opening, including recognition from the New York Times, part of a broader wave of New York restaurants in the 2010s specifically elevating Thai cuisine's presentation and pricing to match the fine-dining treatment more commonly given to French or Japanese restaurants. Fish Cheeks's combination of its seafood-specific Thai menu and its role in a broader elevation of Thai cuisine's fine-dining presentation in New York has made it one of the more critically significant modern Thai restaurants in the city's recent culinary history.
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