Flavorful Thai cuisine is served at Thai Garden in Springfield.
Springfield has an abundance of Asian restaurants. These include Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Indian, and Thai, along with others. One of my recent discoveries, Thai Garden, is a lovely, small restaurant serving delicious food in an inviting, tastefully decorated dining room.
Thai Garden in southwest Springfield has been a long-standing restaurant, formerly known as Tongs. Last year, chef and owner Tong Trithara retired and returned to his homeland in Thailand. When he left, he was approached with many offers to purchase the restaurant. Wishing to maintain the Thai restaurant concept after he left, he sold it to Jenny Khokunthod, another Thai chef, so that she could bring her brand of Thai food to the Springfield community.
Chef Jenny officially reopened the restaurant in November 2024 and has since received great feedback from lovers of this popular style of Southeast Asian cuisine. Thai cuisine is well known for its diverse flavors, including tangy, sweet, sour, and often spicy hot dishes.
During my first visit to the restaurant for lunch with my wife, we discovered a relaxing atmosphere with delicate nuances of fresh and silk flower arrangements, as well as a menu featuring traditional and specialty dishes from the tropical country of Thailand.
Originally born and raised in the vicinity of Bangkok, Thailand, chef Jenny has been working in kitchens for over 28 years. Previously, she owned a Thai restaurant in Schaumburg, Illinois. Her traditional style of cooking features many well-known popular dishes from Thailand, including the national dish, pad thai, which has a unique history.
Pad thai was first popularized in the country in the 1930s during the time of World War II. Due to the war, much of the farmland was destroyed, resulting in a rice shortage. This was a crisis, as rice was—and still is—the primary food staple in the Thai diet. The government needed to act quickly to prevent mass starvation. Making noodles out of rice stretched the supply further, since a small amount of rice could be turned into enough noodles to feed more people than serving plates of plain rice. Luckily, stir-fried noodle dishes were already familiar, so the public easily embraced the change. After rice noodles became more popular, the national dish of Thailand became known as pad thai.
Since then, it has become the most popular dish in the country and a favorite throughout the world. It is made by stir-frying the noodles with bean sprouts, egg, tamarind sauce, and fermented fish sauce. It is also often combined with shrimp, chicken, or pork and garnished with crushed peanuts, scallions, and cilantro. It frequently comes accompanied by a spicy chili sauce, which can be added for those who enjoy a higher level of heat.
Chef Jenny explains that her version is not overly sweet or spicy like many pad thai dishes often found in restaurants. Additionally, like much of the food she serves, it is produced with Thai ingredients imported from her home country.
My meal began with two appetizers. The first was a small plate of chicken satay, which consisted of skewered chicken strips mildly spiced with turmeric, vinegar, and sugar, served with a creamy peanut sauce and pickled diced cucumbers with red onions. The other was potstickers, served in a bamboo steamer. Unlike the typical pork-stuffed potstickers found in many Chinese restaurants, these were filled with a flavorful ground chicken and water chestnut filling. After I tried the appetizers, I was served the pad thai and an entree of stir-fried pineapple chicken, which comes with jasmine rice tossed with cashews, raisins, scallions, onions, and scrambled egg. This was one of my favorites. I found it to have a sublime, fragrant flavor lightly infused with a Thai curry paste. Accompanying the food were two of the restaurant’s popular drinks—Thai coffee and Thai tea. Both were served blended with sweetened cream and came in tall glasses.
The menu features an appetizer section with 14 dishes, a soup and salad section, entrees including curries and stir-fries made with rice or noodles, and a section of seven house specialties.
One specialty is deep-fried tilapia, known as pla rad prik. Chef Jenny told me this is a dish she learned from her mother back home. It is a crispy, fried fish topped with a sweet Thai chili tamarind sauce garnished with garlic, chili peppers, and onions. Unfamiliar to many people, tamarind sauce is made from the tropical tamarind fruit and has somewhat of a sour, tangy lime flavor.
Besides the food, the ambience and decor in the restaurant are of great importance to chef Jenny. As I ate, she explained that she wants her guests to feel like they are “coming home” when they enter her restaurant. She strives to make this happen by using flowers found throughout the dining room, on the tables, and in bouquets in vases placed in select locations. She plans to change the decor annually to keep the dining room visually fresh and guests returning.
The combination of tasty, authentic Thai food and a picturesque decor made for a delightful experience. The next time you are in southwest Missouri, I urge you to stop by for lunch or dinner so that, in the words of chef Jenny, she can share “what real Thai food is all about.”
CHEF DANIEL PLISKA
is a certified executive chef and author. He teaches culinary arts at Ozarks Technical Community College in Springfield.
ThaiGardenSpringfield.com • 3454 South Campbell Avenue, Springfield
This article was originally published in the November/December issue of Missouri Life.
