Thai & Thai

Thai Cooking in Taipei: The Aromatic Argument

Taipei's restaurant scene has spent the past decade consolidating its identity around Taiwanese-French hybrids, Cantonese fine dining, and modernist tasting menus. Places like Taïrroir, Le Palais, and logy define the upper tier of the city's Michelin-recognised dining. Thai cuisine, by contrast, occupies a quieter corner of that recognition landscape, which makes the 2024 Michelin Plate awarded to Thai & Thai worth paying attention to. A Plate designation signals cooking that is consistent, competent, and worth your time. In a city where Thai restaurants rarely surface in formal critical conversations, that recognition matters as a calibration point.

The benchmark for Thai cooking at the regional level is high. In Bangkok, restaurants like Nahm and Samrub Samrub Thai have redefined what Thai cuisine can mean in a fine-dining context, and operations like AKKEE in Pak Kret show what happens when Thai cooking is rooted in regional specificity. Thai & Thai operates in a different register: mid-range pricing ($$), fifth-floor Songshan District positioning, and Michelin recognition that signals quality without the formality of a starred room. It is the kind of place that earns its reputation through the food rather than the setting.

The Aromatics That Define the Cuisine

To understand what Thai & Thai is doing, it helps to understand what Thai cuisine actually demands. The cuisine's identity rests on a set of aromatics that have no true substitutes: lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime leaf, and Thai basil. These are not background flavours. They are structural. Lemongrass provides the citrus-forward brightness that lifts broths and curries; galangal (blue ginger) brings a more medicinal, piney depth that is categorically different from common ginger; kaffir lime leaf delivers a floral-resinous note that is unmistakable once you recognise it; Thai basil adds a peppery anise character that sweet basil cannot replicate. When a Thai restaurant outside Thailand gets these right, the food reads as coherent. When it cuts corners, the dishes flatten out into a generic Asian-adjacent register that satisfies no one in particular.

The fact that Thai & Thai holds Michelin recognition in Taipei's competitive environment suggests the kitchen is not cutting corners on these fundamentals.

Songshan District and the Fifth-Floor Format

The Dunhua North Road address places Thai & Thai in Songshan District, one of Taipei's more commercially active corridors. Dunhua North Road is a broad, tree-lined avenue that runs through a zone of office towers, mid-range hotels, and residential blocks, with restaurants distributed across ground-floor shopfronts and upper-floor rooms. The fifth-floor location is a common format in Taipei, where vertical stacking of restaurants is normal and upper-floor spaces often signal either value-focused operations or destination dining that does not need street visibility to fill seats. At a $$ price point, Thai & Thai sits in the accessible tier of Taipei dining, below the $$$$ format of restaurants like L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon, and occupying a different register entirely from the experiential tasting-menu format that defines most Michelin-recognised rooms in the city.

For context on how Thai cuisine compares to other Southeast Asian cooking in Taipei's broader dining ecosystem, Zaap represents another entry point into the category. The two restaurants address different ends of the Thai dining experience in Taipei, and comparing them gives a clearer picture of the range available in the city.

Where Thai & Thai Sits in Taiwan's Wider Scene

Taiwan's Michelin recognition extends well beyond Taipei. JL Studio in Taichung brought Southeast Asian fine dining to the island's second city in a form that earned stars. GEN in Kaohsiung operates in the south with its own distinct identity. And outside the cities, restaurants like Akame in Wutai Township and the offerings around Volando Urai Spring Spa & Resort show how far Taiwan's formal dining recognition now reaches geographically. Even in Tainan, a city defined by its street food tradition, places like A Cun Beef Soup earn Michelin attention. Thai & Thai occupies a specific niche within this broader pattern: foreign cuisine, Taipei-based, mid-priced, formally recognised. That combination is less common than it might appear.

For readers building a broader Taipei itinerary, the city's full restaurant picture is covered in our full Taipei restaurants guide. Complementary resources include our full Taipei hotels guide, our full Taipei bars guide, our full Taipei wineries guide, and our full Taipei experiences guide.

Know Before You Go

• Address: 5F, 158 Dunhua North Road, Songshan District, Taipei City 105, Taiwan
• Price range: $$ (mid-range)
• Awards: Michelin Plate (2024)
• Cuisine: Thai
• Getting there: Songshan District is well connected by Taipei Metro; Nanjing Sanmin and Zhongshan Junior High School stations are in the vicinity of Dunhua North Road