Skip the takeout and dine in at new ‘everyday Thai’ restaurant in Tacoma

The menus at many Thai restaurants in America can be overwhelmingly long. They leave too much choice in the hands of diners who will lean on the familiar, or who insist on only eating white-meat chicken even though the dish in its native country might typically be served exclusively with bone-in drumettes or perhaps not chicken at all.

At 5-year-old Nana Thai, owners Achiraya Sripanya, who goes by Ashely, and Sukrit Sitthichaisawad, affectionately known as B, approach their food with the reverence they would offer their own families and themselves. Recipes and the business name honor B’s grandmother, but the word “nana” also references a neighborhood in Bangkok with a complicated reputation and, more generally, the notion of a meeting place for all walks of life and the virtue of variety — of choice.

But you don’t get to choose when and how to order your khao soi at the couple’s new brick-and-mortar restaurant in Tacoma’s Lincoln District. You can only dig into a bowl of the unctous, golden liquid — cooked by Sitthichaisawad and served by Sripanya— on site, at a table in the petite dining room on 38th Street. A key ingredient is thua nao, a dried disc of fermented soybeans imported from Thailand, cooked with chicken broth, coconut milk, spices and curry paste. No white meat here, said Sripanya, and no beef or pork or tofu. Two glossy chicken drums swim on the surface with a modest pile of crunchy egg noodles, hiding a swirl of thin, round noodles (not flat). I want three more servings of the punchy pak gat dong (pickled mustard greens), one of several finishing flourishes that immediately made Nana stand apart from many of its local peers.

Sitthichaisawad and Sripanya learned that khao soi didn’t travel well after fielding a few too many customer complaints about the texture of the noodles during their five years at Freighthouse Square. They even tried separating the noodles from the broth, as many pho restaurants do to save the vermicelli from the beef broth before it’s time to slurp, but then people wondered how to assemble it at home. Offering takeout felt necessary at that (sorry to say) rundown food court, where grab-and-go is common, and people aren’t particularly keen on lingering. They had taken over another Thai restaurant there, and some days, they said, it was painfully slow. Once the writing was on the wall of the all-but-inevitable demolition of the historic but dilapidated structure, to be usurped by a light rail station, Sitthichaisawad was on the brink of giving up.

He isn’t a cook by training. A software engineer born in Chiang Mai who immigrated to Washington just under a decade ago, he learned from family and watched videos online. (He used his past-career skills to create all the digital menu elements, website and signage, he said.) Sripanya’s heritage lies in Bangkok, but she also lived in the Northern region of Nan for several years before her family relocated to Arizona. The couple, both in their 30s, met online, they said with a laugh, and just got married in between closing the stall at Freighthouse last December and opening in Lincoln in February.

Sripanya convinced Sitthichaisawad they should keep trying. The owner of Bambu, a Vietnamese dessert shop franchise, decided to move on late last year after nine years in the neighborhood. Everything fell into place, they said.

Like Bloom Thai Cuisine, a similarly small but impeccably welcoming family-run gem in Lakewood, the joy of Nana Thai lies in the brevity and candor of the menu (of 35 dishes, a few aren’t explicitly Thai, venturing to lumpia, orange chicken and beef broccoli), the warmth of the hospitality and the simple but rare gesture of the owner remembering you’ve been there before.

‘Everyday Thai’ at Nana in Tacoma

Start with the garlic pork ribs, quasi-cubed, marinated and fried, served with generous fried garlic and cilantro and sweet chili sauce. The panang curry, for which you can choose your protein, was silky, aromatic and pleasantly interspersed with green bell pepper. Other curries include pineapple and a subtle green. A silver platter, literally, of pad Thai stuck in the way that a good tamarind and palm sugar sauce does, complemented by crunchy bean sprouts and seared tail-on shrimp.

Regulars know to splurge on the crab fried rice, woven with fresh blue crab meat that sings with a proper douse of the house lime-garlic vinegar.

The owners are almost frustratingly humble about their cooking but honest about their warm hospitality. The dishes at Nana, in preparation and menu placement, is rooted in a simple idea, said Sripanya.

“It’s simple Thai food, comfort Thai food, Thai food you can have, like, every day. Nothing too fancy,” she told me in a phone call and reiterated during our Monday afternoon visit when the dining room filled up twice in two hours and takeout customers and DoorDash drivers flowed in and out.

Look no further than the pad ka paow: well-seasoned ground pork with deeply peppery holy basil (not to be confused with Thai basil, a different herb), stir-fried and plated simply with jasmine rice, a puffy fried egg with a runny yolk, bell peppers, slices of raw cucumber and truly hot vinegar with bird’s eye chili. This is your Saturday morning breakfast, your work-from-home lunch, your quick weeknight meal.

“In Thailand, we eat [it] any time of day,” said Sripanya. “It’s really simple, but it’s really good.”

Nana Thai Street Food

• 773 S. 38th St., Tacoma, 253-572-9132, nanathaiteriyaki.com
• Monday-Tuesday and Thursday-Friday 10:30 a.m.-8 p.m., Saturday-Sunday 11 a.m.-8 p.m. (closed Wednesdays)
• Details: new location for Thai comfort food; dining in encouraged for best experience (and the khao soi!); apps $9-$13, most mains $14-$20
• Takeout & Delivery: by phone or direct-online at nanathaiandteriyakiwa.smiledining.com; delivery via DoorDash until 7:30 p.m.

This story was originally published March 25, 2026 at 5:00 AM.