Sala Thai

Reviews

• Megan Y.

  star star star star star 2 June 2026

  Love the owner Pu, she and her staff are like family to us! Always happy to see us, best Thai food on island!
  
  Never a bad time and always leaving wasted cause we just have a blast!!!
  
  Love them

• Big A.

  star star star star star 1 June 2026

  Best Thai Food on the island! Pou is the owner and she is a great hostess that always makes my family feel welcome and is so hospitable! All our out of town guests love the food and company at Sala Thai! Making me hungry for some of their food now!

• Mar S.

  star star star star star 26 May 2026

  Update because they deserve it. We've dined in here twice already and did take out a couple times. It's a bar/ restaurant looked a little out dated to me but don't let that fool you. The food is so good! First time trying the jungle curry and of course I went for thai hottt! so hot but the flavors are there ! Only down side for me was ordering take out one night, it was so busy with bite squad we were told they ran out that night. I still came back the next day  got my fix! And so far we've scored parking right in the front meter parking.

• Paul K.

  star star star star star 20 May 2026

  Very delicious, affordable, friendly, down to earth and comfortable! The staff are extremely friendly and full of aloha and their Thai good is very authentic to the Thai food I eat when visiting Thailand!

• Peter Y.

  star star star star star_border 10 May 2026

  What started out as an excursion to determine if the New Hanagasa Inn had reopened turned into something totally different. My friend Myles told me about 7 months ago that Scott and Trish were reopening in the location of Kikuya in Kapalama behind Diners.
  
  So after picking Alan up at 8:30, we decided to see if they had indeed opened. After driving into the complex around 8:45, we discovered that the Kikuya sign was still in place. Bad sign, literally. For us, not Kikuya.
  
  As we drove out the back side of the complex, we poi dog pondered where to spend our evening. I asked Alan if he wanted to eat at a restaurant or drink at a bar. Alan suggested both, and said he was open to Thai, either at Sala or Pattaya. Driving up Nuuanu Avenue, we saw a parking space just below Sala, so parked.
  
  As we walked the fifty feet to the bar, Poo, Sala's owner, spied us as she stood in the entry talking to a couple smokers, and welcomed us in. The bar was super crowded with regulars. There must have been 60 people in the place and it seemed like they all knew the waitresses, bartenderess Cindy, and each other. Cindy cleared a couple seats for us at the bar and we sat down and ordered our drinks. The place was raucous: people yelling, swearing with the "F" word multiple times, playing darts, playing pool, drinking, eating, and being drunk.
  
  I warched Cindy as she filled orders from customers and waitresses, wrote food orders down and dispatched them to the kitchen, cleared accumulated glasses and bottles, fended off lovey-dovey talk from her inebriated fans, and otherwise kept the operation going. That she can do all this and remain as sweet as she was 20 years ago is like rediscovering the Holy Grail.
  
  Drinking my Diet Coke, amidst all this, I felt like a fly in the potato salad. Alan wanted beef salad, and I wanted pad gra pow. He ordered and the food arrived.
  
  The beef salad was 1.5 stars out of 5. The lettuce was chopped romaine right out of the giant bag from Sam's Club, added after the beef and other ingredients had been carelessly tossed by a luckless pedestrian who happened to be in the kitchen when our order was placed. I think I could prepare a better beef salad blindfolded with one arm, without a recipe. The plain beef had been cooked alone, and had very little flavor from the dressing, which sat in a pit of ignorance at the bottom of the dish.
  
  In the best of beef salads, the flavors are bright, with the sweet sour salty spicy sauce clinging redolently to the beef and wilted greens among the marinated onions and tomato wedges, aromatically scented by cilantro, kaffir lime, basil, mint, and other complexities. In contrast, Sala Thai's beef salad tonight was just a little tastier than a baby's soiled diaper. The uncooked onion slices were too large, and had not soaked up any of the dressing, so tasted like, well, uncooked onions. And who puts sliced carrots in a Thai beef salad? Not my dead mama. Jenny, the first string cook, was MIA tonight. The beef salad she has made for us in the past is worthy of its own Sala (pavilion) pedestal. But not tonight's dish assembled by the soulless robot.
  
  But hey, the chicken pad gra pow wasn't bad. Except the holy basil had a few of the tough stems left in. I never understood why SE Asian cooks leave the cellulose-dense stems in their food. For holy basil stems, it's like chewing on a toothpick, and for lemon grass, it's like chewing on a chopstick. Maybe those SE Asian eaters need the additional fiber in their diets, but we Americans don't like to gnaw on our implements and then swallow them.
  
  Also, I remarked to Alan that in the pad gra pow, I thought the ratio of basil to onions to bamboo shoots was skewed. It was like 1 to 2 to 4. I prefer it 1 to 1 to 0.5. At least the bamboo shoots, which I don't really care for, were sliced translucently thin and soaked up the sauce, so tasted way better than I expected them to taste.
  
  So OK. Pad gra pow passable. Beef salad an utter fail.
  
  By the time we left around 11:00, there were only a few patrons remaining in the bar, and normalcy had begun to set back in. We cruised on out and went home happy.