A number of Thai restaurants were operating in Chicago in the early-to-mid 1970s. The first edition of
The Good (but cheap) Chicago Restaurant Book by Jill and Ron Rohde (1974) lists four: Bangkok House (2544 W Devon), Bangkok Restaurant (3525 N Halsted), Siam Café (4654 N Sheridan), and Siamese Restaurant (3961 N Ashland). They mention “the host of Thai restaurants which has appeared in the past couple of years” but don’t suggest which may have been first.
A year earlier, in the second edition of
The Chicago GuideBook (1973), Bangkok House is listed along with Thai Restaurant (5143 N Clark) and Shanghai Restaurant (406 S Clark, now La Cocina). The last is particularly interesting because it’s noted you need to request the special Thai menu (they also had a Filipino menu written in Tagalog). So the secret Thai menu in Chicago has a long tradition! For what it’s worth, only Thai Restaurant and Shanghai are listed in the first edition from 1972.
Going back a few years more, in Jory Graham’s
Chicago, An Extraordinary Guide from 1967 there are no Thai restaurants listed but she does mention the Filipino menu at Shanghai. Did she not know about the Thai menu or did a chef from Thailand arrive later? That’s all I’m able to document from printed sources.
So perhaps Thai Restaurant in Andersonville was the first mostly-Thai restaurant in Chicago (arguments about authenticity aside). Possibly Shanghai served some Thai dishes earlier. It wouldn’t be surprising if some other Chinese restaurants around the same time employed Thai chefs who would prepare food of the homeland for compatriots but I can find no hard evidence in support.
The first time I ate Thai food was at Bangkok Restaurant probably in 1974 or ’75. It wasn’t until my friends and I started going to Rosded around 1976, and the Western Avenue places a little later, that I became a regular. We didn’t go to Thai Room as much as the others, maybe because it was a little more expensive. On Western, a little north of Lawrence, were Thai Villa and Thai Cousin (I hope that’s correct). Only in 1979 or ’80 did I find Siam Café/Siam Noodle and that became a favorite as well. I believe Siam Café later turned into Siam Noodle while Siam Café relocated nearby. I wasn’t aware of Thai Town back then (anyone know what year it opened?).
Around that time (1979-80) a small Thai market opened in Hyde Park so I was able to purchase fish sauce, canned curry pastes, dried galangal, etc and make my first (pathetic) attempts at cooking Thai food. I still have my first Thai cookbook,
Cooking Thai Food in American Kitchens by Malulee Pinsuvana (1979). It doesn’t hold up real well next to Thompson’s
Thai Food but back then it was a revelation. Shortly after that I moved from Chicago so wasn’t around when Thai restaurants really multiplied here in the early 1980s.
These early Thai restaurants were only a shadow of what we now take for granted in Chicago. They did the best they could with a limited palette of ingredients but opened up new worlds of flavors for many, myself certainly included.